BAGHDAD, 26 November 2005 — The Iraqi government has vowed to take the war to the insurgents amid warnings of a likely increase in violence ahead of next month’s general election after a rebel bombing campaign killed more than 180 people over the past week.
“We are going to strike forcefully at the hotbeds of terrorism in different regions,” Interior Minister Bayan Baker Solagh said yesterday.
“We’ll throw 10,000 men and a thousand military vehicles into these operations, before or after the elections” to be held on Dec. 15, he said.
The elections to a four-year term Parliament are the final step in a US-inspired plan to help build an Iraqi democracy in the wake of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in April 2003.
Government spokesman Leith Kubba warned that “one should expect an increase in violence in the run-up to the Dec. 15 elections,” while adding that those responsible will be “criminals and partisans of Saddam Hussein.”
In two attacks on Thursday, both south of Baghdad, a suicide car bombing against a hospital in Mahmudiyah killed 30 people and a car bomb in a shopping district of Hilla left three dead and 16 wounded.
Yesterday, an Iraqi was killed and three were wounded in an explosion targeting an Iraqi police patrol in Samarra, 125 kilometers north of Baghdad, police said.
Meanwhile, a Friday sermon at a leading Sunni Arab mosque sought to draw a line between resistance and terrorism.
“Resistance to the occupier is a natural and legitimate right,” Sheikh Mahmud Mahdi Al-Sumeidaeyi told worshippers attending Friday prayers at Baghdad’s Um Al-Qura Mosque.
“The terrorism which was let loose in our country came with the occupation” by US-led troops, he added. All Iraqi factions at a meeting in Cairo last weekend accepted the principle of “resistance” while condemning “terrorism directed at civilians, civil, humanitarian and religious institutions.”
The Cairo meeting, which included Iraqi government representatives, also agreed on staging a national reconciliation conference in late February to help bring together Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni factions.
It will also discuss a possible timetable for the withdrawal of US-led forces from the country. The meeting was seen as setting the stage for attempting to draw more Sunni Arabs into the political process ahead of the elections.
Minority Sunni Arabs, dominant under Saddam, are seen as providing the backbone to the raging insurgency. Their largescale boycott of parliamentary elections in January left them politically isolated.
US forces, meanwhile, have just concluded a three-week operation codenamed Iron Curtain in western Iraq designed to root out insurgent strongholds near the Syrian border.
US Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch said earlier this week that since mid-September, US-led forces had killed over 700 rebels and captured 1,500 suspects in western Iraq. There was no independent confirmation.
Sunni rebels, including Jordanian-born Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, have sought to spark sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites in a bid to increase the chaos and discredit the US-backed government.
Many of the bloodiest bomb attacks, including one on Nov. 18 against two mosques in Khanaqin on the Iranian border that killed 80 people have targeted Shiite civilians.
Several Sunni Arab political and religious leaders have also been gunned down over the past weeks, including a Sunni tribal leader and four of his relatives early Wednesday by gunmen dressed as Iraqi soldiers.
In the northern Iraqi town of Mosul, a member of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, Ibrahim Saleh Othman, was kidnapped on Thursday and his body found a few hours later, police said. He had been shot.
Three US soldiers were killed on Thursday in Iraq, when troops celebrated Thanksgiving. Two were killed by a roadside bomb and one when an M-1 Abrams tank rolled over.
The latest deaths brought to at least 2,111 the number of US military personnel killed since the March 2003 invasion, according to an AFP toll based on Pentagon figures.
In Baghdad, security officials were preparing for the resumption on Monday of the trial of Saddam, who along with seven co-accused faces charges linked to the killing of 148 Shiite villagers. The first witnesses for the prosecution are expected to be called, and could do so from behind screens or with faces masked to protect their anonymity, according to a US official close to the tribunal.
Witnesses will offer evidence related to the killings of the villagers after a failed assassination attempt against the former dictator in 1982 in the village of Dujail.
