Car bombs rock Mosul, White House says Iraqi elections far from perfect

BAGHDAD – AFP
Twin car bombs killed at least two Iraqi soldiers in Mosul, while the White House joined the US-backed interim government in acknowledging Iraq‘s elections would be far from perfect.

Against the backdrop of violence, Washington announced it has ended its fruitless hunt for weapons of mass destruction, which was the main rationale for the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

In the troubled city of Mosul, a van tried to swerve inside a joint convoy of US and Iraqi military vehicles, but exploded prematurely, killing an unknown number of civilians, US army Sergeant Chris Schaeffer told AFP.

A second car parked on a street nearby 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 January 30 polls seen as a referendum on who truly controls the city.

The Islamist group Ansar al-Sunna, in an Internet statement, claimed responsibility for an attack in Baghdad in which four bank guards were burnt to death in a van carrying new bank coins.

Also in the capital, a policeman was shot dead and an official in the flashpoint city of Baquba was gunned down, police and witnesses said.

In Duluiya, Iraqi soldiers opened fire on a car that did not stop at a checkpoint, killing three civilians, police said, while four Iraqi soldiers were killed in attacks around Samarra.

With US forces on the offensive hoping to break up rebel cells ahead of the elections, troops in the capital snatched six men linked to last week’s assassination of Baghdad Governor Ali al-Hadaeri, the US army said.

But the unrelenting dose of daily car bombs and assassinations has forced a hard reality check on the White House and US-backed interim government.

Asked if he agreed with Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi that violence will make voting impossible in some areas of the war-torn country, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said: “We all recognize that the election is not going to be perfect.”

Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told an Egyptian newspaper the election would go ahead as planned on January 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.

The resistance movement has been fanned in part by widespread concern among the Sunni Arab 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, Lieutenant General Thomas Metz, also conceded last week the situation remained volatile around the Sunni Muslim populated areas of Al-Anbar, Nineveh, Salahuddin and Diyala provinces.

Meanwhile, McClellan also confirmed Washington‘s 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 resemble a September draft in which the weapons inspector said there were no such arms, the spokesman said.

The report contradicted one of US President George W. Bush’s chief reasons for the war that led to the toppling of Saddam in April 2003 and ushered in the current era of chaos.

As the clock ticked down to polling day, fears of internal Iraqi political strife mounted, as a top Shiite party vowed to cleanse the security forces of ex-Baathists and Allawi’s Iraqi National Accord party cried foul over the alleged use of religion by Shiite political candidates.

Allawi’s party lodged a formal complaint against the joint Shiite list, the Unified Iraqi Alliance, for violating state law by allegedly using religion in its advertising.

A small Sunni Muslim party, the National Front for the Union of Iraq, said it was quitting the electoral race Wednesday due to the arrest by US troops of its leader Sheikh Hassan Zeidan Khalaf al-Lahibi on December 31.

13-1-2005

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