Insurgents have killed 17 Iraqi police and National Guards in another bloody spree of ambushes, bombings and suicide attacks aimed at wrecking Iraq's January 30th national election.
Two explosions rocked Baghdad, including one detonated by a suicide bomber posing as a taxi driver who killed two policemen and a civilian near interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's party headquarters.
The other deadly attacks were centred in the restive Sunni heartland north of the capital, raising further questions among Iraqis on how the country's fledgling security forces will be able to protect voters if they can hardly protect themselves.
In west Baghdad, an explosives-laden car tried to ram through a checkpoint on a road leading to Allawi's party offices but hit a police pick-up truck and blew up, setting nearby vehicles ablaze and sending up plumes of black smoke.
The blast, which also wounded 25 people, came a day after insurgents exposed the vulnerability of Iraq's security services with a suicide bombing that killed 26 National Guards.
The attacks were the latest in a campaign by Sunni rebels trying to drive out U.S.-led forces, cripple the American-backed government and scare voters away from the polls. Iraqi leaders say the insurgency also seeks to provoke sectarian civil war.
The Al Qaeda Organisation of Holy War in Iraq led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, behind most of the attacks since a U.S.-led invasion in 2003, has vowed to "slaughter" Iraqis it brands collaborators with foreign occupiers.
And Osama bin Laden and Islamist groups have pledged to wreck the vote as part of a holy war.
Despite that, Allawi promised Iraqis in a New Year's Eve broadcast that new security forces backed by US led troops would be capable of doing the job.
A suicide car bomb killed six National Guards and wounded eight at a checkpoint near an American military base close to the town of Balad, not far from Sunday's even-deadlier attack in the north, Iraqi officials said.
Two roadside bomb blasts killed another six National Guards and wounded four in Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit. A policeman was killed near the northern city of Mosul when his patrol came upon a decapitated body and tried to move it, setting off a booby-trap explosion.
Gunmen killed two more officers at a checkpoint in Baiji.
In another attack in the capital, a car bomb exploded close to a four-wheel-drive vehicle of the type used by foreign security contractors and leading Iraqi officials, police and witnesses said. There was no immediate word on casualties.
Bloodshed has been heaviest in areas dominated by Saddam's once-privileged Sunni minority which now faces the prospect of elections cementing the newfound political power of the long-oppressed Shi'ite majority.
US and Iraqi officials ushered in the New Year warning they expected a spike in pre-election assaults by insurgents but pledging to do everything possible to safeguard what they say will be the country's first free elections since the 1950s.
But in a sign that the campaign of intimidation was having an effect, an election organising committee in the northern city of Baiji quit en masse on Sunday after receiving death threats.