Iraq to Seal Borders During Election

Guardian/UK
Tuesday January 18, 2005 1:46 PM

By BASSEM MROUE

Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) – Iraqi officials announced Tuesday that they will
seal the nation’s borders, extend a nighttime curfew and restrict
movement inside the country to protect voters during the Jan. 30 vote,
which insurgents are seeking to ruin with a campaign of violence.

Attacks continued Tuesday, with a suicide car bomber detonating
explosives outside the offices of a leading Shiite political party,
killing three other people as part of an apparent rebel campaign to
frighten Shiites from this month’s election. Also, masked gunmen
killed a Shiite Muslim candidate in the Iraqi capital.

A video surfaced Tuesday showing eight Chinese workers held hostage by
gunmen who claim the men are employed by a construction company
working with U.S. troops, in the latest abduction of foreigners in
Iraq.

Elsewhere, a Christian archbishop kidnapped by gunmen in the northern
city of Mosul was released Tuesday, a day after his abduction. The
Vatican had called his kidnapping a “terrorist act.”

Sunni Muslim militants, who make up the bulk of Iraq’s insurgency, are
increasingly honing in on Shiites in their campaign to sabotage the
parliamentary election that is widely expected to propel their
religious rivals to a position of dominance.

Tuesday morning’s car bombing gouged a crater in the pavement, left
several vehicles in flames and spread shredded debris and flesh on the
street outside the offices of the Supreme Council for the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq, a main contender in the election.

The party, known here as SCIRI, has close ties to Iran, and is
strongly opposed by Sunni Muslim militants.

The U.S. military reported the bomber and three others were dead and
four people were injured.

A spokesman for the Shiite party said it would not be cowed. “SCIRI
will not be frightened by such an act,” Ridha Jawad said. “SCIRI
will continue the march toward building Iraq, establishing justice and
holding the elections.”

Iraq’s Independent Electoral Commission announced that the country’s
international borders would be closed from Jan. 29 until Jan. 31
except for Muslim pilgrims returning from the hajj in Saudi Arabia.

Iraqis will also be barred from traveling between provinces and a
nighttime curfew will be imposed during the same period, according to
a statement from the commission’s Farid Ayar.

Such measures had been expected because of the grave security
threat. U.S. and Iraqi authorities are hoping to encourage a
substantial turnout but fear that if most Sunnis stay away from the
polls, the legitimacy of the new government will be in doubt.

Iraq’s interior minister warned Tuesday that if the country’s Sunni
Arab minority bows to rebel threats and stays away from the polls, the
nation could descend into civil war.

Falah Hassan al-Naqib, a Sunni, told reporters he expects Sunni
insurgents to escalate attacks in the run-up to the election,
especially in the Baghdad area. Voters are to choose a new 275-member
National Assembly.

“Boycotting the elections will not produce a National Assembly that
represents the Iraqi people,” he said.

If that happens, he added, the Iraqi people “will enter into a civil
war that will divide the country.”

Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi said in a news conference that he
will boost the country’s armed forces with 70,000 more troops in an
effort to take over more security tasks from U.S.-led forces. He said
they’d be “equipped with the most advanced weapons.”

A video delivered to several news organizations showed eight Chinese
captives in front of a small mud brick building. The men displayed
their passports for the camera and were flanked by two gunmen with
headscarves wrapped around their faces.

The Chinese government later confirmed they had been kidnapped.

In a handwritten note delivered with the tape, an insurgent group
calling itself the al-Numan Brigades said it abducted the men as they
were leaving the country.

“After interrogation, we found that they are working for a Chinese
construction company that is working inside American sites in Iraq,”
the note said.

The note indicated the group might release the hostages because China
did not participate in the war.

In Mosul, Archbishop Basile Georges Casmoussa of the Syrian Catholic
Church was freed a day after he was seized near his church, according
to local church officials and The Vatican.

“I’m happy to have returned to the bishop’s office,” Casmoussa told
Vatican Radio. “I can say that I wasn’t mistreated.”

He didn’t identify his captors but said he didn’t think his kidnapping
was meant as an attack on the Church.

The Vatican said that the 66-year-old archbishop’s captors had
demanded a $200,000 ransom for his release.

Christians make up just 3 percent of Iraq’s 26 million people. The
major Christian groups include Chaldean-Assyrians and Armenians with
small numbers of Roman Catholics. Several churches have been bombed in
recent months, presumably by Islamic extremists.

Elsewhere, a third American trooper died in fighting in Iraq’s
troubled Anbar province, west of Baghdad, the military said
Tuesday. Two other soldiers assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary
Force were also killed in action there on Monday.

It was unclear if the three were killed in a suicide car bombing in
the western city of Ramadi that U.S. officials said resulted in
American casualties. Further details were withheld for security
reasons.

In Baghdad, bursts of heavy machine gun fire were heard for about half
an hour in the afternoon coming from a southern neighborhood, and
witnesses said Iraqi National Guard units were battling insurgents in
that area.

Two U.S. Apache attack helicopters hovered over the area near the bend
in the Tigris River that flows through the center of the capital.

Also, masked gunmen Monday shot dead Shaker Jabbar Sahl, 48, a Shiite
who was running on the ticket of the Constitutional Monarchy Movement,
headed by Sharif Ali bin Hussein, a cousin of Iraq’s last king.

Iraq’s Shiite Muslim majority has welcomed the vote, but many members
of the country’s Sunni Muslim minority want the ballot postponed,
arguing that security is precarious and the election should not take
place under foreign occupation.