IRAQ: Iraqi insurgents staged a major ambush on a road near Baghdad yesterday, killing two policemen, wounding 14 and leaving at least 16 missing on the worst day of violence since last Sunday's election.
The attack came a day after guerrillas in the north dragged Iraqi soldiers off a bus and shot 12 of them dead, and suggests the country's 22-month insurgency is far from over, despite its failure to stop last weekend's vote.
Police said insurgents attacked a police convoy yesterday between Diwaniya, 180 km south of Baghdad, and the capital. Police initially feared 36 were missing but reduced the number as some began returning to Diwaniya.
US forces sealed off the site of the ambush, near the Abu Ghraib area on Baghdad's western fringes. At least a dozen civilians were also killed in yesterday's bloodshed, the worst this week.
Iraq's policemen and soldiers are increasingly bearing the brunt of insurgent attacks as US troops try to assume a back seat role in preparation for an eventual withdrawal from the country they invaded in March 2003.
National security forces are widely perceived to have done a good job in preventing carnage during Sunday's ballot. But they have yet to capture one of the insurgency's key figures - Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the man behind many of the worst atrocities.
Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib said his forces had come close to catching him two or three times in recent weeks.
"I think we arrived a bit late. Maybe we missed him by one hour . . . (but) we will get him - very soon, hopefully," Mr Naqib told Pentagon reporters in a video-conference from Baghdad.
In Wednesday's bus attack near Kirkuk, militants pulled 14 police officers off their bus and killed 12 of them with a bullet to the head. The other two escaped to a nearby village.
In a reminder of the perils of voting in Iraq, militants shot dead two civilians yesterday in a car near the town of Balad, north of Baghdad. Local police said the victims had been singled out because they voted.
At least 10 other civilians were killed in a spate of attacks across the country.
A roadside bomb killed three near the central town of Ishaaq and a Turkish truck driver was killed on a road between the northern cities of Baiji and Mosul.
South of Baghdad, near the largely Shia town of Hilla, gunmen drew up alongside the car of a local government official and shot him dead before escaping.
Hospital sources said US troops killed three Iraqis in the rebellious Sunni city of Ramadi and police said militants killed two men suspected of working at an American base north of Baiji.
Final results of Sunday's poll have yet to be announced and officials say it could be another week before they are declared.
Representatives of the Sunni Arabs, only 20 per cent of Iraq's population but dominant under Saddam, look certain to have fared badly, raising fears they will not be adequately represented in the new 275-member national assembly.