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BAGHDAD- AFP<\/SPAN> 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, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","","category-assyrian-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ado-world.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ado-world.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ado-world.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ado-world.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ado-world.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ado-world.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ado-world.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ado-world.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ado-world.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
?<\/SPAN><\/SPAN><\/B>With milestone elections barely two weeks away, <\/SPAN>
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 <\/SPAN>
The electoral commission expects some 100,000 <\/SPAN>
US-led troops will be relegated to a “supporting role”, <\/SPAN>
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 <\/SPAN>
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 <\/SPAN>
Police identified the dead as an Iraqi contractor and three of his staff.
The <\/SPAN>
The announcement raised US losses in <\/SPAN>
<\/SPAN>
The US-led coalition meanwhile came in for strong criticism from the <\/SPAN>
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 <\/SPAN>
“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.
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\n15-1-2005 <\/SPAN>
\nܢܗܪܝܐ <\/SPAN><\/P>
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