Suicide car bombers hit a bus packed with Iraqi National Guards yesterday, killing 26 people in 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, rebels killed three policemen on patrol close to neighboring 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 civilian bystander also died in the blast.
US and Iraqi officials ushered in the New Year with warnings of an expected spike 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 Major Neal O'Brien, a military spokesman in Tikrit. "They will not be successful."
But in a sign that the campaign of intimidation was having an effect, an election organizing committee in the northern Sunni city of Baiji quit en masse after receiving death threats.
On Saturday, the Al-Qaeda Organization 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 Web site along with the video vowed that the group would "slaughter" other Iraqis it brands collaborators with foreign occupiers.