Wave of Violence by Iraqi Rebels Kills 80 in 3 Days

The New York Times
December 6, 2004

Wave of Violence by Iraqi Rebels Kills 80 in 3 Days
By ROBERT F. WORTH

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 5 - Militants surrounded a bus full of unarmed Iraqi contractors employed by American forces as they rode to work on Sunday morning and gunned down 17 of them. It was the latest in a series of increasingly brazen attacks that have left more than 80 people dead in the past three days and deepened the sense of growing mayhem here as the January elections approach.

The bus ambush in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown, also underscored the increasing risks faced by Iraqis who work for the American-led occupation and are singled out as collaborators. The ambush was part of an intensified insurgent campaign aimed at terrorizing Iraq's fledgling security forces and fomenting sectarian divisions that could undermine the elections or perhaps force a delay.

Since Friday, militants have detonated a car bomb in front of a Shiite mosque, singled out Shiite officers for slaughter in a police station attack, and killed 18 Kurdish militiamen.

Citing the deepening violence, more political leaders added their voices to a growing movement to delay the national and provincial elections now scheduled for Jan. 30. Leaders of Iraq's majority Shiite community have responded to earlier calls by insisting that the elections go forward as planned, and President Bush said Thursday that they must not be postponed.

But the political leaders who gathered in Baghdad on Sunday, mostly Sunni Arabs representing about 40 political parties and individuals, said that the insurgents' campaign of violence and intimidation made credible elections impossible for the moment, and that holding them in January would achieve an illegitimate result that could provoke further civil conflict.

"I warn the two sides that the situation is very serious," said Tawfik al-Yassri, a member of Iraq's interim parliament and a leader of the Iraqi National Coalition party. "It will be the first seed of civil war."

In the first attack on Sunday near Tikrit, 80 miles north of Baghdad, insurgents fired on a bus carrying Iraqi contractors on their way to work for the American military, killing 17 and wounding 20, said Capt. Bill Coppernoll, a spokesman for the First Infantry Division.

He said the attack began at 8:30 a.m., when a sedan overtook the bus and cut it off just before it stopped to let the contractors off. Several attackers leaped out of the sedan, another group in a second car drove alongside, and both groups opened fire on the bus with AK-47 rifles until they ran out of ammunition, then got back into their cars and fled, Captain Coppernoll said.

The contractors all worked on an American military program to gather and destroy the weapons storehouses that are found almost daily throughout Iraq, Captain Coppernoll said.

In a second attack, near the northern city of Bayji, a car packed with explosives drove into an Iraqi National Guard checkpoint and detonated about 9:30 a.m., Captain Coppernoll said. Immediately afterward, insurgents attacked the checkpoint with small-arms fire. Three national guardsmen were killed and 18 wounded, the captain said.

Also on Sunday, one Iraqi soldier was killed and four were wounded in Samarra, 60 miles north of the capital, when insurgents struck their combat patrol with rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire, Captain Coppernoll said.

Just south of Mosul, in northern Iraq, three Turkish truckers were killed when a bomb detonated near a military patrol they were traveling with, military officials said.

The slaughter of the Tikrit contractors on Sunday demonstrated the insurgents' renewed focus on terrorizing and intimidating anyone working with Americans. Iraq's newly formed police, army and national guard have been the main targets of that campaign, in a wave of violent attacks throughout the country that have ranged from armed assaults on military compounds to suicide attacks to beheadings and mutilations.

But during the past three days, the insurgents, believed to be mostly Sunni Arabs, have also made unmistakable efforts to foment ethnic and sectarian conflict by striking at Shiite Muslims and Kurds.

On Friday, a car bomb killed 18 people outside a Shiite mosque in Baghdad, mostly worshipers, heavily damaging the mosque. Almost simultaneously, several dozen militants attacked a police station elsewhere in the capital, killing 12 officers. All those killed were Shiite.

On Sunday, a Baghdad newspaper published an unusual statement purporting to be from Shiite seminary figures, deploring those two incidents and demanding an investigation. The authenticity of the statement could not be immediately confirmed.

On Saturday, a suicide bomber plowed into a bus full of Kurdish militiamen in Mosul, where tensions between the city's Arab and Kurdish populations runs high. At least 18 militiamen were killed.

Also on Saturday, fighting broke out in Latifiya, 25 miles south of Baghdad, between members of a newly formed Shiite militia and a group of Sunni militants who had been accused of killing Shiites on the road to the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf, The Washington Post reported Sunday. That clash left more than 20 fighters dead, The Post reported. American military officials said they knew nothing about the battle, as did a spokesman for Iraq's Interior Ministry.

Shiite leaders in southern Iraq have deeply resented the killings of Shiite security officers and religious pilgrims in the Sunni-dominated area around Latifiya, and last month they began organizing hundreds of young men into so-called Anger Brigades. The stated goal of the brigades has been to kill militant Sunni Arabs in the area around Latifiya in northern Babil Province, known as the Triangle of Death.

The specter of civil conflict also looms over the January elections. Some Sunni political figures at the conference in Baghdad on Sunday, held at the Babylon Hotel, warned that a January election could result in a significantly unbalanced result along sectarian lines, with many Sunni Arabs either boycotting the election or too frightened to go to the polls. Turnout is expected to be high, meanwhile, among Iraq's majority Shiites, and among the Kurds, who dominate in the north.

"A partial election will put the country into chaos," said Tariq al-Hashmi, the secretary general of the Iraqi Islamic Party. The party, one of the better-known Sunni groups, is considering boycotting the elections, Mr. Hashmi said.

At the conference, about 40 officials signed a petition calling for a postponement, and vowed to press their case with the United Nations, the Arab League, the State Department of the United States and other organizations.

A number of Iraq's most powerful political groups, including the party led by the interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, and the two main Kurdish parties, joined a similar call on Nov. 26 to delay the elections. Since then, Kurdish officials have danced a fine line, suggesting that the earlier statement may have been a mistake.

But Iraq's most powerful Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, quickly made clear that he opposed any delay. And on Thursday, Mr. Bush stated firmly that the elections should take place in January.

Another political development on Sunday pointed toward the possibility of an even more powerful electoral advantage for Iraq's Shiites in the first elections since the fall of Mr. Hussein. An effort led by Ayatollah Sistani to create a broad coalition of candidates dominated by Shiites has succeeded, said Hussein al-Shahristani, a spokesman for the committee that is coordinating the effort.

In recent weeks, the coalition had appeared to be fracturing, prompting Shiite leaders to fear that the rifts would allow other groups, like the secular party run by Dr. Allawi, to lure voters who would otherwise support the religious Shiites. The greatest threat to the coalition came from an unlikely renegade movement led by Ahmad Chalabi, the former exile who was once a favorite of the Pentagon, and Moktada al-Sadr, the militant cleric who set off two uprisings against the American occupation and the interim government.

But both Mr. Chalabi and Mr. Sadr have now agreed to join the coalition, Mr. Shahristani said. Mr. Sadr will nominate candidates rather than run for office. The coalition will not formally announce its candidates for the 275-seat National Assembly until Wednesday or Thursday, Mr. Shahristani said.

Abdul Razzaq al-Saeidy contributed reporting for this article.