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January 7, 2005SECURITY
Some Iraq Areas Unsafe for Vote, U.S. General SaysBy DEXTER FILKINS
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 6 - With three weeks to go before nationwide elections, significant areas of 4 of Iraq's 18 provinces are still not secure enough for citizens to vote, the commander of American ground forces here said Thursday.
The acknowledgement came on a day when the Iraqi government announced that it was extending emergency rule in most areas of the country for 30 more days, after a string of suicide attacks that have left more than 80 Iraqi police officers and soldiers dead in the last week. Also on Thursday, seven American soldiers were killed in one of the most lethal roadside bombings to date, when a Bradley armored personnel carrier hit a bomb around 6 p.m. in northwestern Baghdad.
There were few details on the roadside bombing, but Baghdad is one of the four provinces identified by the commander, Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, as having insecure areas. All are in the Sunni heartland, which makes up the core of the resistance.
The other provinces, the general said, were Anbar, which includes Falluja and Ramadi; Nineveh, which contains Mosul; and Salahadin, which includes Tikrit, the hometown of Saddam Hussein. Continuing violence was reported in two of those provinces on Thursday.
His statement came after several major offensives against insurgent strongholds in Falluja, Samara and areas south of Baghdad. It was an acknowledgement of the continued resilience of the Iraqi insurgency, which is thought to number 8,000 to 10,000 fighters and which has grown in strength despite sustained American efforts to crush it.
General Metz, speaking at a news conference here, said military operations were being stepped up to make all areas of the four troubled provinces - which together contain more than half the population of Iraq - safe enough for the vote to be held as scheduled on Jan. 30.
"Today I would not be in much shape to hold elections in those provinces," General Metz said. "Those are the four areas that we see enough attacks that we are going to continue to focus our energies."
The emergency laws that were extended Thursday were imposed in November, on the eve of the invasion of Falluja. They grant the security forces expanded powers to carry out raids and to make arrests and give the government the right to impose curfews. American officials said Thursday that stricter and broader curfews would probably go into effect near the time of the election.
General Metz said Iraq's 14 other provinces were more or less ready to hold elections as scheduled. Security at some 9,000 polling places will be provided largely by Iraqi security forces, he said, with American forces standing back unless they are called in. Though Iraqi security forces have often performed poorly in the face of insurgent attacks, General Metz expressed confidence that the Iraqi forces, which now number about 127,000, could handle the job.
The American troops are being held back to avoid antagonizing potential voters. But the move runs the risk of allowing insurgents to disrupt the elections with attacks.
The 127,000 figure for the Iraqi forces falls far short of the 270,000 Iraqi officials have estimated are needed to secure the country on election day. General Metz said he could not guarantee the safety of every Iraqi who wanted to cast a ballot.
"I just can't guarantee that everyone will be able to go to a poll in total safety," he said. "I cannot put a bubble around every person walking from their home to the polling site."
While the American military claimed to have killed hundreds of insurgents in those operations, some Iraqis said many more insurgents simply fled the battlegrounds to fight another day.
As part of the uptick in military efforts to secure the remaining areas of the four provinces, American forces this week increased operations in and around Mosul, the Sunni-dominated city in northern Iraq that has been particularly violent in recent weeks. The number of American troops there was recently doubled, adding around 3,000 soldiers, and "significant numbers" of Iraqi forces were also sent as well.
The military said two United States marines had been killed Thursday in Anbar, news agencies reported. In Mosul, the police said they had unearthed the bodies of 18 young Shiite men, some of whom had been working at an American military base. They were taken off a bus last month and shot in the backs of their heads.
Despite the difficulties he faces, General Metz gave a mostly upbeat assessment of the security environment here in the final weeks before the vote, which Iraqi and American officials are billing not just as a landmark date in Iraqi history but also as a means to stabilize the country eventually and allow the Americans to leave.
General Metz said attacks against American and Iraqi forces had declined in recent weeks following the monthlong Ramadan holiday.
The general said American and Iraqi forces had been attacked an average of about 70 times a day in the past week. He said he expected the number of such attacks to climb to around 85 a day as election day nears.
The recent spate of suicide bombings, which have also killed dozens of civilians, is a perverse measure of desperation among the insurgents, the general said. He said the guerrillas had realized that they could not persuade the Iraqis to join their cause and so have chosen to intimidate them.
"Murder, kidnapping and torture are not the tools of a popular movement," General Metz said.
Yet attacks are still far more frequent than in late 2003, when the insurgency began to gather steam. At that time, the number of attacks was peaking at an average of around 50 per day.
Like other senior American officials, General Metz said he was opposed to postponing the election, saying a delay would only give the insurgents more time to try to wreck the democratic process. "I think there is a greater chance of civil war with a delay than without one," he said.
He said he favored going forward with the elections as scheduled even if it meant that significant numbers of Iraqis would stay away from the polls. Many clerics and political leaders of Iraq's Sunnis have said they will not vote, some because they fear violence, others because they insist that a fair election cannot take place under a foreign military operation.
"Part of democracy is the right to choose," General Metz said. "If people choose to boycott the election, that is their choice."
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