22 Iraqi Officers Killed Near Baghdad
Pakistan Times Monitoring Desk

BAGHDAD (Iraq): Insurgents attacked a police station south of Baghdad under cover of darkness Sunday, killing 22 Iraqi police and soldiers, police said.

Gunmen seized four Egyptians technicians in Baghdad in the second kidnapping of foreigners in the Iraqi capital within a week.

Elsewhere, at least ten people were reported dead Sunday as Iraqi security forces clashed with rebels in volatile Sunni Muslim districts north of Baghdad and the so-called triangle of death, officials said.

Four people were killed and nine wounded when Iraqi security forces clashed with armed Sunni villagers south of Baghdad, medics said.

The battle erupted after Iraqi soldiers and police raided the village of Albu Mustafa, in the heart of the “triangle of death” south of Baghdad. Two soldiers, a police officer and a gunman were killed, police and medics said.

Four soldiers and five gunmen were wounded. “Clashes erupted between the security forces and the armed men which lasted two hours,” a police officer said.

Anti-US insurgents

Anti-US insurgents have won widespread support in Sunni areas just south of Baghdad that border Shiite southern Iraq, earning the region its notoriety.

In the capital, an employee of the Baghdad provincial government was shot dead in the street by gunmen on Saturday morning, a ministry official said. About an hour later, another man was killed in similar fashion in the same district of eastern Baghdad, the official said.

To the north, three Iraqis were killed in shootings and a bomb blast, while the body of businessman was discovered, secuirty sources said. A soldier and a civilian died when Iraqi troops and rebels clashed in Samarra, raided by US-led troops last October in a bid to rid it of insurgents ahead of the January 30 elections, said Captain Assad Amjad.

Another seven people were wounded, including four children, in a nearby gun battle between insurgents and security sources, said a hospital doctor. Near Balad, a civilian was killed and four soldiers wounded when a homemade bomb exploded as a military convoy went past, said police.

Body Found

Meanwhile, the body of a 46-year-old businessman, Ahmed Abdelkader Abed, was found in Tuz, near Saddam Hussein’s home town of Tikrit. The victim had been shot dead, said police.

Sunnis demand timetable for US withdrawal

A week after Iraq’s historic elections, leading Sunni clerics demanded a troop withdrawal timetable to rejoin the political arena as insurgents kept up their attacks.

Extremist Sunni Arab groups kept up their bloody campaign, killing at least 25 Iraqis and a US marine in a new wave of strikes.

Scores have now been killed since the country’s landmark election on January 30 which is expected to see the majority Shiite community reclaim power.

Conflicting reports from election Monitors

Two groups that monitored Iraq’s landmark elections on Sunday painted a conflicting picture of the event: one calling it up to international standards, the other highlighting widespread cheating.

The voting and subsequent count received high marks from the Iraqi Election Information Network.

“Despite the modest irregularities, elections were carried out according to international standards,” said spokesman Najem al-Rubaiye.

The organisation said it dispatched 8,134 monitors to 2,871 out of a total of 5,587 polling stations.

The group calls itself a non-government organization with a board that includes members of Iraq’s Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni communities.

The only issue raised was the lack of polling sites and sufficient ballot boxes in five districts of the restive city of Mosul. It also said that 23 polling sites in Sinjar, west of Mosul, did not receive enough ballots.

This affected about 18,000 potential voters, said the group.

Representatives of Christian, Kurdish, Shabak and Turkmen communities say the problem affected 200,000 potential voters in the entire Nineveh province, which including Mosul has an estimated one million eligible voters.

Demonstrations

Dozens from the communities demonstrated Sunday outside the fortified Green Zone in Baghdad, home of Iraq’s interim government and the US embassy, demanding a new vote in their areas.

Earlier, another Iraqi monitoring group painted a completely different picture of the elections in the country’s 18 provinces.

“In none of the polling sites did the process go fairly or smoothly,” Masar Alaa of the Tammuz Organisation for Social Development told reporters. “There were a lot mistakes and a lot of cheating.”

The group said it had deployed 1,875 volunteer monitors in all of Iraq’s provinces except restive Al-Anbar, west of Baghdad.

The group showed photographs of chaotic scenes inside polling stations. One showed a man clutching ballots and pointing a finger at one of the boxes on it.

Alaa said this was taken in northern Iraq and that the man was an unauthorized political representative instructing voters to vote for a particular list.

Another picture showed Iraqi soldiers inside a polling station.
Alaa said they were Kurdish militiamen dressed like Iraqi soldiers, who in a polling center in Mosul, coerced people to vote for the main Kurdish coalition.

Another Tammuz official, Mayasa Ghazi, spoke of ballot stuffing in Basra, Iraqi soldiers trying to influence vote counting and village mosques in the predominantly Shiite south instructing voters on loudspeakers on election day to vote for certain lists.

She also said that in the southern city of Samawa women were segregated from men and told to vote for the list headed by interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.

About 29,000 Iraqi observers, 50,000 political party representatives and 181 foreigners monitored the elections, the electoral commission said.

A commission member dismissed Tammuz’s report “as anecdotal.”

“They should provide us with full documentation of all the evidence that they have regarding these claims instead of revealing them like this at a press conference,” said Farid Ayar.

The commission has received more than 220 complaints, mostly about Nineveh, where elections were hastily arranged amid insurgent threats.

The final results for the national assembly vote is expected to be announced by Thursday. The United Iraqi Alliance, blessed by Iraq’s Shiite spiritual father, Grand Ayotallah Ali al-Sistani, has dominated partial vote counting.

300 prisoners released from Abu Gharaib Jail

Yet another story says that at least seven people including two Iraqi soldiers, three security officials and one US soldier have been killed in clashes in Iraq while 300 prisoners have been released from the Abu Gharaib jail.

Two Iraqi soldiers and three officials were killed in the southern area of Baghdad during clashes with insurgents.

Attacker Killed

One attacker was also killed in the operation while several were injured. One US soldier was also killed in clashes with insurgents south of Baghdad.

The Iraqi food ministry says that the US army has released 300 prisoners from the Abu Gharaib jail and have said that more prisoners would be released in the coming days.●