Iraq unveils security plan aimed at preventing polling day bloodbath

BAGHDAD- AFP
?With milestone elections barely two weeks away, Iraq‘s interim government unveiled a security plan aimed at stopping anti-US insurgents making good their threat to create a polling day bloodbath.

The goverment will declare a holiday for the January 30 vote and impose tight restrictions on movement, including a total ban on vehicles around polling stations, State Minister Wael Abdul Latif told reporters.

“Polling stations will be well safeguarded — no vehicles will be allowed anywhere near and there will be restrictions on traffic,” he said.

“There will be separate body searches for men and women.”

Abdul Latif acknowledged that the threat of insurgent attack had compromised preparations for the poll in some areas and that there was a possibility the vote might not be able to go ahead in some parts of the four main Sunni-majority provinces.

Electoral commission chief Abdul Hussein Hendawi said that violence in Al-Anbar province, west of Baghdad, and Nineveh province around the main northern city of Mosul had prevented any registration of voters.

Voter registration would be carried out on polling day in those provinces, he said.

Hendawi declined to elaborate on voting arrangements for Al-Anbar, where commission officials acknowledge that they have yet to identify polling stations.

“Anbar — Ramadi (the provincial capital) — will have secure centres, that’s all I can say,” he said.

In the capital, where certain Sunni neighbourhoods are considered insurgent strongholds, security arrangements have been drawn district by district, Abdul Latif said.

He hinted that on polling day Iraqis might be barred from travelling outside their home cities or even neighbourhoods.

The Iraqi army commander for the northern province of Tamim, General Anwar Amin, told AFP last week that no travel would be allowed between the province’s various towns.

The electoral commission expects some 100,000 Iraq security personnel to be mobilised for election day.

US-led troops will be relegated to a “supporting role”, US military spokesman Brigadier General Erve Lessel told AFP last month, providing “quick reaction forces and back-up forces.”

There was no let-up in the violence as the government unveiled its plans. Two mortar rounds hit a police station just outside the heavily fortified Baghdad compound which houses the interim government and the US embassy.

At least two civilians were wounded, medical sources told AFP.

South of Baghdad, the bullet-riddled corpses of four Iraqis working with a foreign company, were discovered near the town of Al-Suweira.

Police identified the dead as an Iraqi contractor and three of his staff.

The US military announced that one soldier was killed and three wounded in a roadside bombing in Mosul on Thursday. Another US soldier was killed in a separate attack in the city the same day.

The announcement raised US losses in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion to 1,356.

Portugal confirmed that it would withdraw its 120-strong military police contingent from Iraq on February 12, after seeing through its pledge to help provide polling day security.

The US-led coalition meanwhile came in for strong criticism from the British Museum for causing “substantial damage” to ancient Babylon, one of Iraq‘s most important archaeological sites.

Future excavations at the site have been compromised by its use as a miltitary depot by US and Polish forces over the past two years, the curator of the museum’s Ancient Near East department, John Curtis, said.

“This is tantamount to establishing a military camp around the Great Pyramid in Egypt or around Stonehenge in Britain,” Curtis said in a report, cited by London‘s Guardian newspaper.

“The status of future information about these areas will therefore be seriously compromised.”

Curtis called on the Iraqi authorities to appoint an international team of archaeologists to compile a full inventory of the damage.

15-1-2005

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