BAGHDAD, 15 January 2005 — Insurgents increased deadly attacks yesterday ahead of Iraq’s elections in barely two weeks’ time. And a US general here conceded that troops could not guarantee to control all violence in the capital.

Insurgents set off a bomb yesterday in a voting center in Sharqat, a town with a strong rebel presence north of Baghdad, badly damaging it, police Lt. Col. Farris Mehdi said.

No one was in the center at the time of the blast, the second there in two months.

Sharqat, 300 kilometers (185 miles) north of Baghdad in Salahuddin province, is located in the Sunni heartland.

Rebels have gained a foothold there due to animosity among the local population over the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and their own fears of rule by the country’s long-oppressed Shiite majority.

In other violence, a civilian, a policeman and two Iraqi soldiers were killed in separate incidents north of Baghdad.

Meanwhile, in the northern city of Mosul, a car bomb exploded yesterday as a US convoy drove through the central district of Al-Muthanna, a witness said.

There was no immediate confirmation from the US military in Mosul, one of the trouble spots where insurgents are expected to attempt to derail elections.

Five peshmerga (Kurdish fighters) were killed and three wounded in two attacks in Mosul on Thursday, said an official from Masoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party, one of the two main Kurdish factions.

A bomb targeted Iraq’s Shiite majority late Thursday, killing seven people, including four policemen, and wounding 38 others outside a Shiite mosque in Khan Bani Said, north of Baghdad.

The same evening, gunmen shot dead another member of Iraq’s electoral commission, west of Baghdad, an Interior Ministry official said yesterday.

He was the eighth electoral official to be killed in the runup to the poll planned for Jan. 30.

In other violence, two US Marines were killed Thursday in Iraq’s violence-wracked western Al-Anbar province.

Senior US officials and commanders in Baghdad were bracing for bloodshed on election day, anticipating car bombs, gunfire, mortars and rocket attacks.

“There are places here that are ugly. There are other places looking pretty dog-gone good,” Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Hammond, a deputy commander of US troops in the capital, told reporters yesterday.

“Intimidation factor is probably more prevalent in some places than other.” He cautioned that there was no guarantee that Iraq’s election security plans were foolproof.

“A terrorist got into a base camp in Mosul and detonated a bomb and killed American soldiers. An insurgent would probably make every effort to penetrate (the polling stations),” Hammond said.

Concern has also been raised within the US Embassy. A senior American official told AFP that sections of western and northern Baghdad, including the Sunni Adhamiya district, would probably have low turnout due to the threat of insurgent reprisals against voters.

In some of those districts, voter registration forms were not even handed out, the official added.

The latest violence came after an aide to Iraq’s top Shiite leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, the aide’s son and four bodyguards were murdered Wednesday night after they left prayers in the Sunni-majority town of Salman Pak, southeast of the capital.

— With input from agencies