Pro-US Baghdad governor shot dead

BAGHDAD -- Gunmen killed the governor of Baghdad province and several bodyguards yesterday in a swiftly executed mid-morning attack. Governor Ali al-Haidari had been a vocal supporter of US reconstruction efforts in Iraq.

Five American servicemen were also killed in a day of violence that included a suicide truck bombing in the capital that left 10 Iraqis dead, among them eight police commandos serving in a special unit of the Interior Ministry.

Militant groups drawn from Iraq's Sunni minority and foreign Islamic radicals have waged an increasingly violent campaign in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 30 national elections, which the insurgents oppose.

The violence has prompted some Iraqi officials to call for a delay of the elections to entice more of the country's Sunnis to participate.

"We want to give our Sunni brothers another chance even if this means delaying the vote," Iraqi Defense Minister Hazem al-Shaalan told reporters in Cairo on Monday.

But delaying the vote past Jan. 31 would entail rewriting the country's transitional constitution and require a new UN Security Council resolution, officials said. US, Shi'ite, and Kurdish officials and others also argue that any change in the election schedule in the face of a concerted campaign of intimidation and violence would hand a victory to the militants.

"There are people who are opposed to democracy in Iraq," said Hamid al-Kifaey, who heads the Democratic Society Movement, a secular, multiethnic slate of candidates with strong ties to former Iraqi exiles. "We can't give in to them. If we delay the elections six months because of security, there's no guarantee in six months security will be any better."

The escalating violence has racked the nerves of many Iraqis.

"We fear that Iraq is turning into a madhouse," said Ghassan Attiya, leader of the National Independent Party, one of the Sunni groups running in the election. "We don't know where this country is heading. Some [candidates] are afraid to reveal even their names, so how can we conduct elections?"

The morning began when a suicide bomber detonated a fuel truck filled with explosives near the entrance to a Ministry of Interior compound, creating a blast that shook the entire city, left at least 10 dead, and injured dozens. US troops quickly converged on the scene of the blast.

An hour later, witnesses said Haidari, already the target of an assassination attempt in September, was traveling in a convoy that included a black BMW and several white four-wheel-drive vehicles when he came under attack by gunmen approaching from several directions.

Bullet-riddled vehicles and pools of blood could be seen at the assassination site, in the west Baghdad neighborhood of Hurriyah, considered a stronghold of Sunnis who oppose the elections. Six of Haidari's bodyguards also were killed, according to the Associated Press.

Militants loyal to Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi quickly claimed responsibility for the attack, posting apparent footage of its aftermath on the Internet.

"Young mujahideen holy warriors from the Al Qaeda Group of Jihad in the Land of Two Rivers assassinated a tyrant from among the Americans' agents," said a statement, which could not be authenticated. "We tell every traitor and everyone who is loyal to the Jews and the Christians that this will be your fate."

Several Iraqi political figures said Haidari was a candidate on one of the lists participating in the elections, but that could not be confirmed.

Haidari recently began raising his profile, publicly lauding the US Army's efforts to improve schools and electrical and water infrastructure at a pair of press conferences.

"The American Army helped us much to carry out projects," he told reporters last month. "These projects will improve the living conditions of people in Baghdad. We shouldn't play down the role of the support given by the American army."

Dali al-Khafaf, an adviser to a political group close to Haidari, called him cooperative, respectable, and patriotic. "He wanted to serve Iraqis," she said.

A half-hour after the assassination, three US soldiers were killed in Baghdad when a roadside bomb hit their convoy. Another soldier was killed yesterday in Balad, 30 miles north of the capital, while a US Marine was killed in the country's western deserts, military officials announced.

The attacks came a day after three British security contractors were killed in a car bomb blast at an entrance to the fortress-like Green Zone, the country's administrative center.

The violence in Iraq has increased since a videotape surfaced last week in which Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden all but declared war on the elections. Voters in a huge swath of the country stretching from Mosul in the north down to Baghdad and west to Ramadi may be too intimidated to vote, even if they want to, some officials say.

"Low voter turnout in these areas will give a distorted picture of the situation in Iraq," said Adnan Pachachi, the Sunni leader of the secular Independent Democrats. "Large sections of the population will . . . be disenfranchised."

Elections have been held amid violence in other countries, but never nearly as bloody as contemporary Iraq, said Tom McDonald, partner in the Washington, D.C., office of law firm Baker & Hostetler LLP and a former US diplomat who monitored elections in Zimbabwe and Cambodia.

"There were violence, intimidation, efforts to dumb down the vote, long lines, and people being turned away from the polls," he said in a telephone interview. "But in Iraq you could die if you vote. I haven't seen anything like this anywhere."

Despite the bloodshed, Iraq's majority Shi'ites and pro-American Kurds are readying themselves for an election they expect will hand them control of the country for the first time.

At the headquarters of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution, which tops a coalition of Shi'ite parties and politicians, workers yesterday prepared election posters and banners.

"This incident will only make us more determined to continue the political process," said Ali al-Aboudi, an official of the council. "So what if they killed Haidari? There are a thousand other Haidaris."