BAGHDAD, 2 December 2004 — Iraq’s interim government was engaged in a flurry of contacts at home and abroad yesterday ahead of the Jan. 30 elections after one of the deadliest post-war months prompted calls to delay the landmark vote.

Four people, including three children, were reported killed in a restive town north of the capital while another seven were wounded when a suicide car bomb exploded near a national guard checkpoint south of Baghdad.

The suicide attacker detonated his charge on the edge of Latifiyah, where US-led forces are conducting a vast operation against insurgents behind a string of attacks in the area in recent months, an AFP reporter said.

On Nov. 23, US, British and Iraqi forces launched a massive sweep of the area around the town in an area known as the “triangle of death” in the latest push to reclaim rebel bastions ahead of the January polls.

The US Marines said more than 200 suspected insurgents have been captured since the start of “Operation Plymouth Rock”, which came on the heels of operations against fighters in Fallujah and Mosul.

North of the capital, a bomb attack in Baquba killed an Iraqi truck driver. Three children died in the town Tuesday when insurgents fired mortar shells on a US military position, their mother told AFP.

Separately, Islamist group Ansar Al-Islam claimed to have killed three Iraqi “collaborators” with US forces west of Baghdad, in a website statement. It was not clear when the killings took place.

On the political front, interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi met King Abdallah and Iraqi exiles in Jordan to rally support for the planned elections in January.

Imad Shabib, a member of Allawi’s Iraqi National Accord party, said the talks sought to “forge unity in Iraq away from confessional differences” in the run-up to the Jan. 30 polls.

Jordan will “fully support” Baghdad in its efforts to hold elections, state television quoted King Abdallah as saying.

The premier will then head to Russia and Germany — two notable anti-war opponents — for talks, but not France, who has yet to mend its broken fences with Washington cause in the run-up to the 2003 invasion.

In a gesture toward Sunni Muslim opposition groups and organizations with possible ties to the insurgency, Allawi is to meet with some 120 exiled Iraqi opposition figures in Amman on Dec. 8.

Despite trying to muster support from its neighbors to secure its borders and improve security before the vote, his government traded barbs at Iranian talks with its hosts over which side was not doing enough to fight unrest.

In Baghdad, the country’s President Ghazi Al-Yawar voiced his support for holding the elections as scheduled. “From a moral and legal point of view, we must respect the election date,” he told reporters.

But despite Allawi’s insistence that the level of violence has dropped since the Fallujah assault, Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan cast fresh doubt on the schedule, saying security was still short of what was required.

“I have the impression that all the conditions for the election in Iraq have not been reached... I am not content as far as security is concerned because for one thing our borders are open,” he said in Rome.

The interim authorities have rejected a call from several major Iraqi parties for a six-month election delay because of insecurity.

In a move that could potentially shape the future political landscape of Iraq, Shiite Muslim officials announced that a list backed by Grand Ayatollah Al-Sistani would be presented to the electoral commission yesterdays.

Sistani — the highest religious Shiite authority in Iraq — is one of the most powerful and popular figures in the country and commentators argue that any list endorsed by him would be favorites in the polls.

Iraq’s two main Kurdish political parties are to run for the general elections on the same list, the leader of one of the groups said. “The Kurdish political powers have reached an agreement to present a joint list for the general elections as well as for the Kurdish parliament,” said Massud Barzani, who heads the Kurdistan Democratic Party.

Meanwhile, a US press report revealed that US army generals were told that elite military units and CIA agents were abusing detainees in Iraq one month before the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke.