BAGHDAD, 13 January 2005 — Several civilians and two Iraqi soldiers were killed as twin car bombs rocked Mosul yesterday while US troops detained six men suspected of killing Baghdad’s governor.
Meanwhile Washington announced it has ended its fruitless hunt for weapons of mass destruction.
Against the backdrop of violence, Iraq’s top officials acknowledged that parts of the country remained too dangerous to hold national elections.
On the diplomatic front, Iraqi interim President Ghazi Al-Yawar started a four-day visit to Paris during which he is to meet with French President Jacques Chirac and other top officials.
In the troubled city of Mosul, a white van tried to swerve inside a joint convoy of US and Iraqi military vehicles, but exploded prematurely, killing several civilians, US Army Sgt. Chris Schaeffer said.
A second car parked on a street, not far away from the first blast, exploded and killed two Iraqi soldiers, Schaeffer said.
The northern metropolis of 1.5 million people has become a battle terrain for insurgents and Americans, with the Jan. 30 polls seen as a referendum on who truly controls the city.
The militant group Ansar Al-Sunnah Army, in an Internet statement, claimed responsibility for an attack in Baghdad in which four bank guards were burned to death in a van carrying new bank coins.
Also in the capital, a policeman was shot dead and the director of municipal services in the flashpoint city of Baqubah was gunned down, police and witnesses said.
With US forces on the offensive hoping to break up rebel cells ahead of the elections, US troops in the capital snatched six men linked to last week’s assassination of Baghdad Gov. Ali Al-Hadri, the US Army said.
But the unrelenting dose of daily car bombs and assassinations has forced a hard reality check on the US-backed interim government.
Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told an Egyptian newspaper the election would go ahead as planned on Jan. 30 but conceded there would be problems in ensuring a nationwide vote.
“The elections will not be perfect, nor organized 100 percent. There will be problems but we will hold them because the majority of people want them,” Zebari said.
He told the government newspaper Al-Ahram that voting could be carried out in 14 of Iraq’s 18 provinces and that in the four troublesome provinces efforts would be made to ensure a level of participation.
Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said Tuesday that some areas were not secure enough for people to vote in what are being touted as the first fully free and fair elections in half a century.
“There are some pockets that will not participate in the election but they are not large,” Allawi said on a bloody day that saw 26 people killed despite the prime minister saying the authorities were winning the battle against insurgents.
The resistance movement has been fanned in part by widespread concern among the Sunni elite, which dominated Saddam Hussein’s regime and all previous Iraqi governments, that the new Parliament will be dominated by the long-oppressed Shiite majority.
The second in command of US forces in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, also conceded last week the situation remained volatile around the Sunni populated areas of Al-Anbar, Nineveh, Salahuddin and Diyala provinces.
A US soldier was among those killed in Al-Anbar on Tuesday, raising to 1,352 soldiers the number of American soldiers killed in action since the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
Meanwhile, White House spokesman Scott McClellan confirmed the hunt for Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction has basically ended and that an interim report by top US arms inspector Charles Duelfer saying there are no weapons to be found will likely stand.
A report authored by Duelfer’s Iraq Survey group, which is to be released to the US Congress in the coming weeks, will be similar to a September draft in which the weapons inspector said there were no such arms, the spokesman said.
— With input from agencies
