BAGHDAD, 25 November 2004 — Iraq geared up for key January polls as more than 200 political groups threw their hat in the electoral ring while US-led forces swept hotspots in the “triangle of death” yesterday in a push to reclaim rebel enclaves.
Amid fears that insurgents would step up their attacks to sabotage the elections, violence gripped the country, with two assassination bids in Mosul, a suicide car bomb in Baghdad and a string of other incidents.
The launch of the huge operation in the notorious area south of Baghdad on Tuesday came as the international community voiced its support of the tight timetable for Iraq’s first post-Saddam Hussein elections.
In Washington, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the United States would send an unspecified number of extra troops to Iraq and beef up Iraqi forces ahead of the Jan. 30 vote.
Some 5,000 American, British and Iraqi forces took part in Operation Plymouth Rock that began with raids on villages north of the city of Hilla, the US military said.
The force looked set yesterday to make its way northward to the lawless areas blocking access to the capital.
The towns of Latifiyah, Yusufiyah, Mahmudiyah and Iskandariyah lie inside the so-called “triangle of death”, an area where Sunni rebels have carried out a string of deadly attacks in recent months.
The operation came on the heels of a massive assault on Fallujah, the largest since last year’s US-led invasion. The city had been under insurgent control since April and its recapture was seen as essential to organizing the promised January elections.
Most of Fallujah’s 300,000 inhabitants fled the city before the assault began Nov. 8, but with a few rebel pockets still to be brought under control, humanitarian needs inside the city remain unknown.
US forces were no longer meeting any resistance in the city. But insurgents remained active elsewhere.
The leader of a special Iraqi commando force sent from Baghdad to back US-led efforts to restore control of Mosul, the country’s third-largest city, escaped an assassination attempt, US military officials said.
US forces returned fire and killed the four attackers.
The US military said five bodies were found in Mosul, bringing to 20 the number of corpses found there in recent days, many of them Iraqi soldiers.
Meanwhile in western Baghdad, a suicide car bomber killed two other people, police said, adding that the victims may have been foreigners.
The bodies of two Iraqis thought to have been working with the US military were found north of Baghdad, police said.
A national guardsman and two civilians, including a four-year-old child, were also killed in shootings around the Sunni trouble spot of Samarra, security and hospital sources said.
Extremist groups operating in Iraq have warned they would try to derail the electoral process, amid fears that the Fallujah assault may only have displaced the problem to other cities.
This week’s two-day conference on Iraq in Egypt, during which world powers expressed unanimous support for the country’s first multiparty elections in half a century, also irked radical groups.
— With input from agencies
