BAGHDAD, 4 February 2005 — Insurgents struck back after a postelection lull, waylaying a minibus carrying new Iraqi Army recruits, detonating car bombs, firing on Iraqis heading for work at a US base and gunning down an Iraqi soldier in the capital, officials said yesterday.
At least 28 people, including two US Marines, died in insurgent-related violence starting Wednesday night, according to US and Iraqi reports.
Insurgents had eased up on attacks following Sunday’s elections, when American and Iraqi forces imposed sweeping security measures to protect the voters.
Meanwhile, Iraqi election officials said yesterday they have sent a team to Mosul to look into allegations of voting irregularities in the surrounding Ninevah province. Officials were vague about the nature of the complaints, which have included polling stations running short of ballots, confusion over the location of polling centers and ongoing military operations.
In the deadliest incident, insurgents stopped the minibus south of Kirkuk, ordered army recruits off the vehicle and gunned down 12 of them, said Maj. Gen. Anwar Mohammed Amin. The insurgents allowed two of the soldiers to go free and ordered them to warn others against joining Iraq’s US-backed security forces, he said.
The assailants identified themselves as members of Takfir wa Hijra, a group that emerged in the 1960s in Egypt.
Elsewhere, gunmen fired on a vehicle carrying Iraqi contractors yesterday to jobs at a US military base in Baqubah north of the capital, killing two people, officials said. Two civilians were killed and six injured Wednesday night when insurgents fired mortar shells at a US base in Tal Afar, 50 kilometers west of Mosul.
A suicide car bomber struck a foreign convoy escorted by military Humvees on Baghdad’s dangerous airport road yesterday, destroying several vehicles and damaging a house, Iraqi police said.
Helicopters were seen evacuating some casualties, witnesses said. There was no immediate comment from the US military. The American and British embassies had banned their personnel from using the dangerous stretch of roadway late last year.
Insurgents ambushed another convoy in the area, killing five Iraqi policemen and an Iraqi National Guard major, police said.
In another incident west of the capital, residents of the insurgent stronghold of Ramadi discovered the bodies of two men who appear to have died of gunshot wounds and who were dressed in blood-soaked civilian clothes.
A handwritten note tucked into the shirt of one of the men claimed the two were Iraqi National Guardsmen.
In Qaim, near the Syrian border, a car bomb exploded at a house used by US military snipers, witnesses said. Other US troops responding to the scene opened fire, hitting some civilians, the witnesses said. A US military spokesman had no immediate information on the attack.
In the south, gunmen overran a police station in the city of Samawah, killing one Iraqi policeman and injuring two others Wednesday night, Japan’s Kyodo news agency reported. Japanese troops are based outside Samawah.
An Iraqi soldier was killed yesterday as assailants opened fire as he was leaving his home in Baghdad, officials said. The governor of Anbar province, a rebel stronghold west of the capital, escaped assassination yesterday when a roadside bomb exploded near his car in Ramadi. Gov. Qaoud Al-Namrawi escaped injury but a woman was injured when his guards opened fire.
Both Marines were killed in clashes Wednesday in Anbar province, which includes such restive cities and towns as Ramadi, Fallujah and Qaim.
In a rare case of civilians fighting back, villagers killed five insurgents who attacked them for taking part in the elections, police said yesterday.
The insurgents launched the raid Wednesday after earlier warning the inhabitants of Al-Mudhiryah, south of Baghdad, against taking part in Sunday’s vote, said a police captain.
The upsurge in violence occurred shortly after interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi declared that the success of Iraq’s elections had dealt a major blow to the insurgency and predicted victory over the rebels within months.
Iraq’s Electoral Commission said yesterday that 1.6 million ballots, or just over 10 percent of the estimated number of registered voters, had been counted at its Baghdad headquarters over the past two days.
Commission member Mustafa Safwat told reporters: “1.6 million votes have been counted.”
Electoral Commission president Abdel Hussein Al-Hindawi said on Wednesday that election result would be known within a few days.
But commission spokesman Farid Ayar told AFP earlier: “But I can’t say when the results will be available. It’s pure speculation to talk of three or four days.”
An initial ballot count was made at individual polling stations and the final count began at the commission center in Baghdad on Tuesday.
