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BAGHDAD, Iraq
(AP) U.S. forces carried out a series of raids in
Iraq's troubled northern city of Mosul, the military
said Sunday, as American and Iraqi authorities
scramble to prepare for elections there in the face
of mass resignations of polling staff and police.
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.''
In the Mosul area, 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.
East of Mosul, a Katyusha rocket slammed into a
home near the Kurdish regional parliament building
in Irbil where leaders of the two main Kurdish
parties were meeting to discuss the election, a
police official said Sunday.
The Mosul area has emerged as a major flashpoint
between U.S. and Iraqi forces and the insurgents,
raising fears that the election cannot be held in
much of the city, Iraq's third largest.
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. A new police chief was appointed a
week ago to command a force of barely 1,000 police.
Last November the city had 5,000 police.
Similar mass resignations are believed to have
occurred in other Sunni Muslim areas of northern,
central and western Iraq.
''I would underscore that there was intimidation in
Afghanistan the Taliban threatened all kinds of
violence against people who registered or people who
voted,'' Wolfowitz told reporters Sunday 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.''
Also Sunday, insurgents attacked an Iraqi National
Guard patrol south of Baghdad, injuring two
guardsmen, one of them critically, police Lt. Adnan
Abdul-Allah said.
West of the capital, in the city of Ramadi, five
explosions rocked a joint U.S.-Iraqi National Guard
base, sending columns of smoke rising above the
area, witnesses said. Sporadic clashes were reported
in the city center.
Elsewhere, U.S. troops fired on a car that sped
toward them near the central city of Samarra on
Sunday morning, wounding two people, the military
said. A spokesman said ground troops fired warning
shots before aiming directly at the vehicle. The
driver and a passenger were wounded.
Iraqi police and several witnesses, however,
reported that four people were killed and that the
vehicle was hit by tank fire.
A major insurgent group claimed responsibility
Sunday for kidnapping 15 Iraqi National Guard
members who were reported missing last week. The 15
guardsmen had been pulled from a bus near their base
in the town of Hit, 90 miles west of Baghdad.
A statement posted on an Islamic Web site took
responsibility on behalf of Ansar al-Sunnah.
''Your brothers were able to carry off a well-turned
ambush against the crusaders' right hand in Iraq,''
the statement said, using ''crusaders'' as a term
for Western forces.
It gave no indication of the men's fate.
Ansar al-Sunnah has claimed responsibility for
numerous attacks, including a December suicide
bombing that killed 22 people, most of them
Americans, at a U.S. military dining tent on a base
in Mosul.
The group is also blamed in the August executions of
12 Nepalese construction workers and twin suicide
bombings in February that killed 109 members of
Iraq's assertive Kurd minority.
Elsewhere, 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 that have caused
hours-long waits at gas stations.
About a dozen of them entered the ministry and
complained to Minister Thamir Ghadbhan, asking why
U.S. troops have fuel for their vehicles and Iraqis
don't.
Meanwhile, the ministry announced that Iraq expects
to resume pumping crude oil from its northern oil
fields to the export terminal of Ceyhan in 10 days.
The flow of oil through the northern pipeline has
halted since an explosion caused by saboteurs on
Dec. 18.
A ministry statement said repair work on the damaged
export pipeline that carries crude oil from Kirkuk
oil fields to the Turkish port of Ceyhan was
expected to finish in 10 days and exports were to
restart immediately after.
Iraq's northern pipeline, the target of repeated
insurgent attacks, was pumping around 400,000
barrels a day before the latest attack. The storage
facilities at Ceyhan ran dry last month.
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