IRAQ: Suicide car bombers hit a bus packed with Iraqi national guards yesterday, killing 25 guardsmen and one civilian. It was the deadliest attack of its kind in four months on Iraqis co-operating with US forces to secure a January 30th election.
Two insurgents in an explosives-laden vehicle veered into the path of the bus and blew it up outside a US military base near the town of Balad, north of Baghdad.
Hours later, guerrillas killed three policemen on patrol close to neighbouring Samarra, and shot dead a member of the city's governing council as well as his driver and bodyguard.
The attacks in the Sunni heartland, where loyalty to deposed dictator Saddam Hussein runs deep, were the latest targeting Iraq's fledgling security forces and government officials in a bloody campaign to scare voters away from the polls.
A national guard officer said the car bomb killed 25 soldiers on the way to their posts. Relatives wept over the men's bodies at a local mosque. "My son, my son," one man wailed as he clutched at a wooden coffin. A bystander also died in the blast.
US and Iraqi officials ushered in the new year with warnings of an expected rise in pre-election assaults by Sunni insurgents trying to drive out US-led forces and topple Iraq's government.
"Those responsible for this attack . . . are trying to prevent democracy in Iraq," said Maj Neal O'Brien, a US military spokesman in Tikrit. "They will not be successful." But in a sign that the campaign of intimidation was having an effect, an election organising committee in the northern Sunni city of Baiji quit en masse after receiving death threats.
On Saturday the al-Qaeda Organisation of Holy War in Iraq led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi released a video of five Iraqi security men being shot dead in the street.
A statement posted on an Islamist website along with the video vowed that the group would "slaughter" other Iraqis it brands collaborators with foreign occupiers. Yesterday's bombing was the deadliest suicide attack against Iraqi security services since mid-September, when at least 47 people were killed outside a Baghdad police station.
Many Iraqis wonder how police and national guards will be able to protect voters at polling stations when they can barely protect themselves.
Insurgents assassinated two local government officials for Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad, and an Iraqi police major outside his home in Baghdad on Saturday, signalling they would persist with their killing spree in the new year.
Zarqawi's group claimed responsibility for one of the deaths, that of Nawfal Abdul-Hussein al-Shimari, head of Diyala's governing council.
Yesterday insurgents ordered all municipal workers out of the main local government building in the town of Sharqat, near the volatile northern city of Mosul, and blew it up.
In the al-Qaeda-linked group's video, masked militants lined up five national guardsmen, their hands bound behind their backs, and shot them from behind. Passers-by stopped to watch.
"To the families of civil defence forces, the National Guard and the police we tell you to say your final goodbyes to your sons before you send them to us. Our reward to your sons is slaughter," a masked militant said in a statement.
Five men in civilian clothes were found shot dead in Ramadi, capital of restive Anbar province, earlier this week. A note said they were security men killed by guerrilla fighters.
Zarqawi's group, which has claimed most of the worst suicide attacks in Iraq since the fall of Saddam, has beheaded several foreign hostages and led a campaign of assassinations, bombings and ambushes against Iraq's new security forces.
Interim Prime Minister Mr Iyad Allawi told Iraqis in a New Year's Eve broadcast that his government would do all it could to ensure voters' safety, backed by US-led troops and the new Iraqi security services.
Osama bin Laden and Islamist groups have pledged to wreck the vote as part of a holy war in Iraq.