US signals that Iraq vote will not be delayed

BAGHDAD -- The top US diplomat in Iraq said yesterday that security conditions would improve enough in the coming months to allow national elections to proceed in January as scheduled, and he suggested that the country's Sunni Muslim minority would likely abandon plans to boycott the voting once it became clear it would not be postponed.

Speaking to foreign reporters at the US Embassy inside the walled compound known as the Green Zone, US Ambassador John D. Negroponte gave the clearest indication yet that the Bush administration would not allow a delay in the Jan. 30 elections, an essential step toward establishing the first broadly accepted government in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein. But his assurances came at the end of a month in which 134 US troops died in Iraq, almost matching the highest one-month total of 135 in April, and underscoring how much work lies ahead in pacifying the country before the voting takes place.

''There's a couple of months to go," said Negroponte, emphasizing that the violence prompting concerns over the viability of the January elections is centered largely in western Iraq. ''Steps are being taken to improve the security situation there, and they will continue."

Negroponte's comments served as a US response to more than a dozen Sunni organizations that in recent days have threatened to boycott the voting and potentially undermine its legitimacy in the eyes of many Iraqis. The January election, the first of three planned for next year, is intended to select a National Assembly that would choose an interim government and draft a new constitution.

Violence in the Sunni-populated region north of Baghdad continued.

A car bomb exploded in a busy marketplace near a US military convoy in the oil town of Baiji, killing at least four people and wounding more than 20 others, including two US soldiers. Baiji, about 125 miles north of Baghdad, sits within the so-called Sunni Triangle, a region once loyal to Hussein and now the heartland of resistance to the US occupation of Iraq. Another car bomb detonated in western Baghdad shortly before noon, wounding five US soldiers.

Many Sunnis, who account for roughly 20 percent of Iraq's population but exercised extraordinary political power under Hussein, are calling for the vote to be delayed until US and Iraqi forces are able to tame the violence concentrated mostly in Sunni areas. But the long-oppressed Shi'ite Muslim majority has rejected those appeals, and Negroponte warned yesterday that Sunni parties should consider how much they stand to lose if they follow through with their threat.