U.S. launches raids to curb violence before vote

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- U.S. troops staged a series of raids in Mosul and other areas of northern and central Iraq on Sunday, arresting dozens, even as a top American official conceded U.S. and Iraqi forces cannot stop "extraordinary" intimidation by insurgents before this month's crucial national election.

The crackle of small-arms fire reverberated through a busy neighborhood in the center of Baghdad, sending shoppers scurrying, and underscoring the precarious security situation less than two weeks before balloting.

The violence centered on Mosul, the country's third-largest city, where insurgents shot dead a member of a local government council and set off explosives as a U.S. convoy passed, damaging a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. It was unclear whether there were casualties. A mortar damaged a school to be used as a polling place.

The rest of the country remained tense. Insurgents shot dead three policemen and wounded seven others 25 miles southeast of Baghdad as they were driving new police cars to the southeastern city of Kut, police said.

In central Baghdad, insurgents attacked an Iraqi National Guard patrol on the east side of the Tigris river and then melted into the crowd in the open market area, sending shoppers running. Sounds of heavy machine-gun and automatic-weapons fire reverberated for nearly an hour along Haifa street on the western side of the river.

U.S. deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz acknowledged that the security threat to the Jan. 30 election was worse than in last October's nationwide balloting in Afghanistan and that it was impossible to guarantee "absolute security" against the "extraordinary intimidation that the enemy is undertaking."

Different than Afghanistan

"There was intimidation in Afghanistan -- the Taliban threatened all kinds of violence against people who registered or people who voted," he said in Jakarta, Indonesia. "But I don't believe they ever got around to shooting election workers in the street or kidnapping the children of political candidates."

An Associated Press poll of Americans indicated 53 percent are not optimistic that a stable government will take hold in Iraq.

Even in heavily Shiite areas of south-central Iraq, which is far more stable than Mosul or Baghdad, several election workers have been threatened and resigned in recent days, a senior U.S. Embassy official said Sunday in Hillah while outlining election preparations in the region.

"Most expect a high turnout if things seem quiet enough. There is some worry if you have a series of car bombs, people will think twice about coming," the official said.

Around Mosul, the U.S. Army's Stryker Brigade Combat Team detained 11 suspected insurgents, including an alleged cell leader, and seized weapons and bomb-making material in several weekend raids -- part of the military's strategy to try to secure the city short of launching an all-out offensive.

The Mosul area has emerged as a major flashpoint between U.S. and Iraqi forces and the insurgents, raising fears the election cannot be held in much of the city.

U.S. and Iraqi officials are scrambling to recruit new police and election workers in Mosul after thousands of them resigned in the face of rebel intimidation. Similar mass resignations are believed to have occurred in other Sunni Muslim areas of northern, central and western Iraq.

With hours-long waits at gas stations across the country, the Iraqi government denied what it called "rumors" that the Oil Ministry planned to keep gas supplies low to deter car bombs. The government has indicated it plans to restrict much driving around the election.

But the long gas lines clearly were becoming a sore point.

About 300 followers of radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr began a three-day sit-in in front of the Oil Ministry in Baghdad to protest gasoline shortages. About a dozen entered the ministry and complained to Minister Thamir Ghadbhan, asking why U.S. troops have fuel for their vehicles and Iraqis do not.

Meanwhile, the ministry announced that Iraq expects to resume pumping crude oil from its northern oil fields to the Turkish export terminal of Ceyhan in 10 days. The flow of oil through the northern pipeline has halted since a Dec. 18 explosion by saboteurs.

Elsewhere, the body of a man was found in a street in the insurgent stronghold of Ramadi with a paper on his back identifying him as an Egyptian citizen.

"This will be the punishment of anyone who deals with American forces," the paper read.

Gunmen also shot dead an Iraqi who works as a translator for a Filipino company working on water projects for multinational forces near Kut, a medical official said.

And the fallout from an earlier crisis, the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, continued to reverberate.

Many Iraqis criticized a 10-year prison sentence given to U.S. Army Spc. Charles Graner Jr., the alleged ringleader shown smiling beside naked Iraqi prisoners in photos transmitted around the world.

Hussein Mohammed, a 22-year-old student in Baghdad, called the trial unfair and the sentence too light.

"The judge should have been an Iraqi and meted out the death penalty," he said.