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Suicide car bomb targets Allawi office in Baghdad
A suicide car bomb has exploded at a checkpoint leading to Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's party offices in Baghdad, injuring three people, police told an AFP reporter on the scene.
"It's a suicide car bomb," a policeman said.
The car smashed into the heavily-guard police checkpoint that blocks the road to Allawi's Iraqi National Accord party headquarters.
On January 3, a suicide car bomber killed three people in an attack on the same checkpoint.
The country's deadly insurgency is likely to undermine the legitimacy of the future parliament by ensuring that voters in violence-wracked Sunni areas are effectively excluded from the election.
The interim government and its US backers have already conceded that voting will be problematic in four of the main provinces in the so-called Sunni Muslim triangle, out of the total of 18 provinces where the January 30 vote is being held.
Sunni insurgents, including Al-Qaeda's Iraq frontman Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, have been escalating their campaign of bloodshed in a bid to disrupt an election it fears will hand power to the long oppressed Shiite majority.
"The elections are the most significant visible symbol of the ongoing US-engineered transition and therefore an important target," said Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group.
"If they go wrong, the US project in Iraq might also go off-track. Moreover, the elections also constitute a way for the Shiite majority to gain political dominance, something the insurgents, who are predominantly Sunni-Arab based, certainly do not want to see happen."
Even US President George W. Bush acknowledged the influence the insurgency -- said to have as many as 200,000 fighters and sympathisers -- will have on the vote, the first since Saddam Hussein was toppled in April 2003.
"It shows that the terrorists and Saddam's loyalists recognize how high the stakes are in Iraq. They are doing everything they can to try to derail the transition to democracy and disrupt the upcoming elections," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said recently.
"That's why it's important that we do everything we can to help the Iraqi people move forward on elections. This election which is coming up is an important first step... on the path to democracy."
Since the beginning of the election campaign, rebels have launched attacks against buildings designated as polling stations, assassinated vote organizers and warned of strikes against anyone who dares cast a vote.
Major counter-insurgency operations spearheaded by the US military against the rebel strongholds of Fallujah and Samarra late last year appear to have done nothing to break the militants' grip on Sunni areas or create enthusiasm for the election.
In the provinces of Al-Anbar, around Fallujah, and Nineveh, around the main northern city of Mosul, election organizers admit they have had to keep their preparations under tight wraps for fear of insurgent attack and polling stations have yet to be chosen.
Hiltermann said the problem was not the sheer number of people who were likely to stay at home on polling day but the sectarian nature of the threatened boycott.
"The problem is the exclusion not of 20 percent of the electorate but of 20 percent who happen to be from the same community -- Sunni Arabs," he said.
A US-led coalition official questioned whether the insurgents could really continue to command support over Sunni areas so long as they remained their preferred battleground. "One of the odd things about this insurgency is that so much of its violence is aimed at intimidating its own Sunni community," the official told AFP. The head of the Iraqi Centre for Strategic Studies and Research, Saadun al-Dulaymi, said the interim government and its US backers had erred in billing Sunday's polls as a milestone on the road to democracy after portraying last June's handover to an interim government as the end of US-led occupation. "We had thought that June... would be a magic wand to solve our problems but the problems got worse," Dulaymi said. "Now the elections are being hailed as another magic wand but if the problems are not really resolved, violence will be redoubled." Dulaymi questioned whether guaranteeing coopted positions for Sunni representatives in the new 275-seat transitional national assembly would do anything to ease the former elite's sense of disenfranchisement. "The representatives of the provinces of Al-Anbar and Mosul will be subject to the whims of the party which chose it. And the rebels will tell people 'they have imposed representatives that you do not respect' and that will be enough to continue the violence," he said. |
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