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Five Iraqi police killed by bombers, gunmen
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A suicide bomber posing as a taxi driver killed two policemen and a civilian near Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's Baghdad party headquarters on Monday as insurgents pressed a bloody campaign to wreck Iraq's Jan. 30 election.
In west Baghdad, an explosives-laden car tried to ram through a checkpoint on a road leading to Allawi's party offices but hit a police pick-up truck and blew up, setting nearby vehicles ablaze and sending up plumes of black smoke. The blast, which also wounded 25 people, came a day after
insurgents exposed the vulnerability of Iraq's security services with a suicide
bombing that killed 25 National Guards. Monday's explosion in Baghdad hit a police roadblock about a kilometer (half a mile) from the main offices of Allawi's Iraqi National Accord bloc just minutes before the party had been due to hold a news conference to announce its slate of candidates. Aides said Allawi, a secular Shi'ite who heads Iraq's U.S.-backed government, was safe and had not been near the scene at the time of attack. "Most of the casualties have been among the security forces manning the checkpoint. No one senior from the Iraqi National Accord was hurt," a senior Iraqi official told Reuters. Police commanders said the bomber had been driving a taxi, a method used before by insurgents to avoid raising suspicion. After a loud explosion that rocked the capital, ambulances rushed to the scene, where wounded lay on the ground as police fired warning shots in the air to clear the area.
Another policeman was killed near the volatile northern city of Mosul on Monday when his patrol came upon a decapitated body and tried to move it, setting off a booby-trap explosion. Gunmen killed two more officers manning a checkpoint in the town of Baiji, police said. Guerrillas have killed hundreds of security force members cooperating with U.S. forces since the toppling of dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003. On Sunday, insurgents in an explosives-laden vehicle veered into a National Guard bus and blew it up outside a U.S. military base near the town of Balad, north of Baghdad, in the deadliest attack of its kind on Iraqi forces in nearly four months. The attack took place in a region dominated by Saddam's once-privileged Sunni minority, which now faces the prospect of elections cementing the newfound political power of the long-oppressed Shi'ite majority. U.S. and Iraqi officials ushered in the New Year warning they expected a spike in pre-election assaults by insurgents but pledging to do everything possible to safeguard what they say will be the country's first free elections since the 1950s. But in a sign that the campaign of intimidation was having an effect, an election organizing committee in the northern Sunni city of Baiji quit en masse on Sunday after receiving death threats.
The Al Qaeda Organization of Holy War in Iraq led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, behind most of the deadliest attacks since a U.S.-led invasion in 2003, has vowed to "slaughter" Iraqis it brands collaborators with foreign occupiers. Osama bin Laden and Islamist groups have pledged to wreck the vote as part of a holy war. Despite that, Allawi promised Iraqis in a New Year's Eve broadcast that new security forces backed by U.S.-led troops would be capable of doing the job. |
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