Surge In Iraq Violence Kills 28
Insurgents struck back with a vengeance following a post-election lull, killing at least 26 Iraqis and two Marines in new attacks, and the first partial election results, released Thursday, showed the Shiite cleric-endorsed ticket running strong.
The partial results came from 1.6 million votes counted so far in Baghdad and five others of Iraq's 18 provinces. The United Iraqi Alliance, which is backed by the country's most influential Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, had 1.1 million votes, and the list led by interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's list was second with more than 360,500 votes.
The figures showed the alliance leading over Allawi in all six provinces but were too small to indicate a national trend. The results came from 25 percent of the votes cast in Baghdad and partial counts from five Shiite-dominated provinces, where the Alliance had been expected to do well.
The commission has said it could take up to seven to 10 days from Sunday's election to produce full official results. So far, tallies from 10 percent of the country's polling stations have been counted, it said.
Seats in the 275-member National Assembly will be allocated by the percentage of the nationwide vote that each faction wins. Around 14 million Iraqis were eligible in the election, but turnout is still not known.
In other developments:
Iraqi election officials said Thursday they sent a team to Mosul to look into allegations of voting irregularities in Ninevah province, a largely Sunni region.
Insurgents had eased up on attacks following the elections, when American and Iraqi forces imposed sweeping security measures. But starting Wednesday night, guerrillas launched a string of dramatic attacks.
In the deadliest incident, insurgents stopped a minibus south of Kirkuk, ordered army recruits off the vehicle and gunned down 12 of them, said Maj. Gen. Anwar Mohammed Amin. Two soldiers were allowed to go free, ordered by the rebels to warn others against joining Iraq's U.S.-backed security forces, he said.
The assailants identified themselves as members of Takfir wa Hijra, the name of an Islamic group that emerged in the 1960s in Egypt, rejecting society as corrupt and seeking to establish a utopian Islamic community.
Elsewhere, gunmen fired on a vehicle carrying Iraqi contractors Thursday to jobs at a U.S. military base in Baqouba north of the capital, killing two people, officials said.
A suicide car bomber struck a foreign convoy escorted by military Humvees on Baghdad's dangerous airport road Thursday, destroying several vehicles and damaging a house, Iraqi police said
Insurgents ambushed another convoy in the area, killing five Iraqi policemen and an Iraqi National Guard major, police said.
Also, the bodies of two slain men wearing blood-soaked clothes were found in the western insurgent stronghold of Ramadi.
Car bombs also targeted a house used by U.S. military snipers in Qaim, near the Syrian border, a U.S. convoy in Mosul and British troops in the southern city of Basra. Two soldiers were wounded in the Mosul blast. Scattered clashes erupted between U.S. troops and insurgents in Mosul throughout the day, and an anti-tank mine struck a U.S. Stryker armored vehicle, but there was no word on casualties.
Other attacks in Baghdad, the northern town of Tal Afar and the southern city of Samawah killed four Iraqis. A roadside bomb exploded near the car of the governor of Anbar province Thursday in Ramadi. Gov. Qaoud al-Namrawi was not harmed, 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.
The post-election lull in attacks had prompted Allawi to declare that the vote's success dealt a major blow to the insurgency.
"The coming days and weeks will show whether this trend will continue," he told Iraqi television. "But the final outcome will be failure. They will continue for months but this (insurgency) will end."
Iraqis turned out in large numbers to vote for the National Assembly, provincial councils and a regional parliament for the autonomous Kurdish north. But in large areas of the country where the Sunni Arab-led insurgency still roils, few went to the polls, either because of objections to the holding elections under foreign occupation or for fear of retribution.
Kurdish political leader Jalal Talabani said he would seek the office of either president or prime minister when the National Assembly convenes.
Jockeying has already begun for leadership positions. The assembly must elect a president and two vice presidents by a two-thirds majority, then it must approve the prime minister chosen by the three. Kurds voted in large numbers, and the ticket led by Talabani and Barzani is expected to win a sizeable bloc of seats.
Because many Sunnis stayed away from the polls, influential Sunni clerics are challenging the legitimacy of the ballot, as well as the new government and the constitution that the National Assembly is to create.
"We cannot participate in the drafting of a constitution written under military occupation," said Mohammed Bashar al-Feidhi, a spokesman for the Sunni clerical Association of Muslim Scholars.