Mortars bombard Baghdad

BAGHDAD -- A barrage of mortar fire yesterday ended a brief period of relative calm in Baghdad, killing at least one civilian and wounding more than a dozen, while insurgents continued a ruthlessly efficient campaign against Iraqi police forces and politicians cooperating with the US mission in Iraq.

Explosions from mortar rounds that arced into the city center from a stretch of farmland to the south rattled windows for miles, burned buildings, and sent Iraqis running for cover. The attacks marked the most intense insurgent activity in Baghdad since a wave of violence two weeks ago after US and Iraqi troops raided the Abu Hanifa mosque, a revered Sunni shrine.

Mortar rounds struck the office of the Iraqna cellphone company, sending black smoke into a clear sky, and smashed into an electronics laboratory, parking lot, and courtyard at the University of Technology.

There are no military installations near the campus in the bustling middle-class neighborhood of Karada, leading some witnesses to suggest a link between the attack and recent warnings that the school should not permit men and women to study together.

A nearby girls' high school that was damaged in the attack serves as an information center to help Iraqis register for the scheduled January elections. Some Iraqi Sunni leaders have demanded the elections be delayed until violence subsides.

''I had been worried ever since they chose this school to help the elections," said Suad Saleem, 28, a teacher at the girls' school. ''Even if the technical college was the target, there are only students there. They just want the students to stop going to school."

Citing security concerns, the US Embassy yesterday banned its employees from using the highway linking the embassy area to the international airport, a 10-mile stretch of road plagued by frequent suicide car-bomb attacks.

The move, which followed similar action by the British this week, reflected the growing difficulty that US forces are having ensuring safe passage along the high-profile route. Precisely because of the road's importance, insurgents have shown increasing boldness and ferocity in targeting vehicles used by US military personnel and civilian contractors.

US officials have predicted an increase in insurgent activity in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 30 election of a 275-member National Assembly -- the first national vote since Saddam Hussein's fall. The Pentagon plans to increase the number of US troops in Iraq from 138,000 to 150,000 by mid-January in an effort to ensure safe voting. A US soldier was killed yesterday on patrol in the northern city of Mosul, military officials reported.

The January elections would be the first of three planned for Iraq next year, culminating in the selection of the country's first elected postwar government in December 2005. But some leaders of Iraq's Sunni minority have said the insurgent activity concentrated in Sunni-dominated regions makes voting there impossible. More than a dozen Sunni parties have threatened a boycott unless the elections are delayed, a request rejected yesterday by President Bush and previously by leaders of Iraq's Shi'ite Muslim majority, which was battered by Hussein's Sunni-led government.

Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, who led a bipartisan delegation of four US senators on a one-day visit to Iraq, said yesterday that January's elections were ''critical for the future of a free, democratic Iraq."

''They will be imperfect," Hagel said. ''We hope elections here will include all the individuals, parties, groups that wish to participate in the elections. That's what gives democracy credibility, that people participate."

The mortar fire in Baghdad, including two rounds that landed inside the fortified riverside area known as the Green Zone, where the US Embassy and many government offices are located, was one of several insurgent strikes conducted as US military operations continued in restive areas north and south of the city. Other attacks in the capital -- including the beheading of an Iraqi police official Wednesday that came to light yesterday -- and in northern areas where Sunni insurgents are most active, were more precise and more chilling.

Police officials disclosed yesterday that Imad Jabouri, a lieutenant colonel in the Iraqi traffic police, was grabbed a day earlier from in front of his home in the Sabaa al-Bour neighborhood in northern Baghdad by several armed men as he left for work. The men beheaded Jabouri, who directed traffic at a busy intersection in front of the Green Zone, and fled with his police badge and pistol, according to a police official who declined to be named for security reasons.

''Those men cut off his head, and this is the way they kill the people who they think are spies and agents," said the official, who said Jabouri's absence from work on Wednesday prompted inquiries into his whereabouts. ''I'm afraid they will use this badge in their next operations."

Military officials in Mosul, meanwhile, reported the discovery of more than a dozen unidentified bodies. More than 60 corpses have been found in the past few weeks. They are believed to be the remains of members of Iraqi security forces killed by insurgents.

In Baqubah, a city 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, US forces face a determined Sunni-led insurgency. At 2:30 p.m. yesterday, a car carrying several local political leaders was attacked by armed men who pulled up beside them on Baqubah's primary commercial street. Two members of the municipal council of the nearby town of Khalis, Hashem Kadhem Jassim, 60, and Abdulrasul Ahmed, 65, were killed.