Gunmen opened fire on the local headquarters of three political parties north of Baghdad on Wednesday, killing an Iraqi policeman, a police official said.
Insurgents attacked the Baquba offices of the Communist party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the United Iraqi Gathering with heavy machine gun fire. A traffic policeman was killed and four bystanders wounded in the attacks, according to police spokesperson Hassan Ahmed.
In a separate incident, a United States convoy was attacked on the road to Baghdad airport. At least one vehicle was destroyed, witnesses said. Insurgents also carried out overnight attacks on at least two schools in the capital to be used as polling stations in this weekend’s elections. A bomb was found at a third school and was defused.
Residents of Ramadi, 110km west of Baghdad, reported clashes between US troops and rebels, which erupted when a US patrol came under attack with rocket-propelled grenades. One Iraqi was killed and two were wounded, according to Dr Dhiaa al-Hiti of the Ramadi general hospital.
In western Iraq, A US marine helicopter transporting troops crashed, but there was no immediate word of casualties.
The helicopter went down about 1.20am (10.20pm GMT on Tuesday) near the town of Rutba, about 360km west of Baghdad, while conducting security operations, the US military said in a statement.
A search and rescue team has reached the site and an investigation into what caused the crash is under way, the military said. The US has lost at least 33 helicopters since the start of the Iraq conflict in March 2003, according to a study by the Brookings Institution. At least 20 of them were brought down by hostile fire, the institution said.
In the northern city of Mosul, insurgents released a video recording apparently showing three captive Iraqis who said on the tape that they work for the Iraqi electoral commission.
The footage, seen by Reuters correspondents, showed the three men seated in a room with insurgents pointing weapons at them. One of the hostages, identified in the video as Abdul-Khaliq Ahmed, said he worked for the electoral commission in the province that includes Mosul and was the administrative director of an election office in the city.
Two militants wearing balaclavas appeared in another scene without the hostages, one holding a pistol while reading a statement, and the other posed for the camera by looking through the target sight of a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
”We are mujahideen in the province of Nineveh. What they call elections have no basis in the Islamic religion and that’s why we will hit all election centres,” the militant said. The militants did not threaten to kill the election workers in their statement.
Several insurgent groups in Iraq, including the group led by al-Qaeda’s purported leader in the country, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, have declared war on the electoral process.
The election set for Sunday will be Iraq’s first multiparty poll in half a century.
Voters will elect a 275-member assembly that will pick Iraq’s new transitional government and draft a permanent constitution for the country.
Despite the continuing violence, British Prime Minister Tony Blair indicated on Wednesday in an interview with The Financial Times that Britain and the US may begin handing over large parts of Iraq to the country’s security forces after the election.
Blair was not drawn on a deadline for withdrawal, but he told the FT that Washington and London were set to agree ”timelines” with the new government that would indicate the pace at which Iraqi forces could take over less troublesome parts of the country.
”Both ourselves and the Iraqis want us to leave as soon as possible. The question is, what is ‘as soon as possible’? And the answer is: when the Iraqi forces have the capability to do the job,” he said.
”There are areas where we would be able to hand over to those Iraqi forces. Remember, 14 out of the 18 provinces in Iraq are relatively peaceful and stable.” – Guardian Unlimited Â