Mortar Barrage Kills Up to 14 in Iraq

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Insurgents targeted Iraqis signing up for the country’s security forces for a second straight day Tuesday, killing up to 14 people in a mortar attack on an army recruitment center in Baghdad, officials said.

As ballot counting proceeded in Iraq’s general elections, a Kurdish ticket moved into second place behind a coalition of Shiite religious parties, relegating a faction led by U.S.-backed Prime Minister Ayad Allawi to third place.

Elsewhere, an Iraqi politician who drew notoriety after visiting Israel escaped assassination Tuesday but his two sons were killed, officials said.

Police said insurgents shelled the old Muthana airfield in the heart of the capital, home to an Iraqi National Guard headquarters that has come under frequent attack in the insurgent campaign to undercut Iraq’s fledgling security services.

Officials at Baghdad’s Yarmouk Hospital said the barrage killed up to 14 people, all of them army recruits. Space ran out at the hospital’s morgue, and bodies, some of them missing limbs, had to be placed on the ground.

Violence erupted elsewhere in Baghdad on Tuesday, as militants battled Iraqi security troops and explosions sounded over the city, leaving at least five other Iraqis dead, officials said.

Three police officers were killed in clashes that broke out in Baghdad’s western Ghazaliya neighborhood, scene of numerous clashes and assassinations over the past six months.

Also, assailants sprayed a politician’s car with gunfire, killing two of the man’s sons, an Interior Ministry official said. The politician, Mithal al-Alusi, who heads the Nation party, escaped the attack unhurt.

Al-Alusi, a former leading figure in the Iraqi National Congress party led by prominent politician Ahmad Chalabi, was expelled from the party last year after visiting Israel to attend a conference on terrorism.

Al-Alusi is one of the candidates who ran in the Jan. 30 landmark elections.

On Monday, gunmen killed an Iraqi chef employed by American forces at Baghdad International Airport, hospital officials said Tuesday.

More than a week after landmark elections, a Kurdish group pulled into second place ahead of Allawi’s candidates after votes were released from the Kurdish self-governing area of the north.

First election returns from the Sunni heartland – including Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit – confirmed on Monday that many Sunnis stayed away from the ballot box, leaving the field to Shiite and Kurdish candidates. A Shiite-dominated ticket backed by the Shiite clergy leads among the 111 candidate lists, with a final tally of last week’s election for a 275-member National Assembly expected by week’s end.

Allawi, who favors strong ties with the United States, had hoped to emerge as a compromise choice for prime minister, but those on the Shiite cleric-backed ticket say they want one of their own for the top job.

Kurds, estimated at 15-20 percent of the population, gave most of their votes to a joint ticket made up of the two major Kurdish parties, which was in second with about 24 percent of the votes reported as of Monday. One of the Kurdish leaders, Jalal Talabani, has announced his candidacy for the presidency.

Allawi’s ticket trailed with about 13 percent of the vote, with the Shiite ticket leading with about half the votes. Shiites comprise about 60 percent of Iraq’s 26 million people.

Tuesday’s attacks were the latest sign that insurgents are stepping up their assault on Iraq’s security forces, which the United States hopes can assume a greater role once a newly elected government takes office. A day earlier, 15 people, most of them applicants for police jobs, were killed in a suicide car bombing in the city of Baqouba, north of Baghdad.

Also Tuesday, a militant group claimed in an Internet statement that it has executed a female Italian journalist abducted in Baghdad for spying on “holy fighters.”

There was no way to verify the authenticity of the statement, which offered no proof that Giuliana Sgrena, a 56-year-old reporter, had been held by the group. She was kidnapped by gunmen on Friday in Baghdad.

The bombings, shootings and kidnappings have shattered a brief downturn in violence after the Jan. 30 elections, the first nationwide balloting since the fall of Saddam in April 2003.

Figures released Monday by the election commission from Salaheddin province, which includes Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit, also confirmed suspicions that many Sunnis avoided the polls.

With results in from 80 percent of the province’s polling stations, the United Iraqi Alliance – which is backed by the country’s top Shiite clerics – had the most votes with 27,645. The Kurdish Alliance was next with 18,791 votes.

A party headed by the Sunni Arab president, Ghazi al-Yawer, received only 15,832 votes. The faction led by Allawi, a secular Shiite who ran on a law and order platform, got just over 13,000.

In London, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Tuesday he hoped that international support for training Iraqi security forces would broaden at a NATO summit later this month.

Giving evidence to a committee of lawmakers, Blair said he expected members to strike an agreement at the Feb. 22 meeting in Brussels, where President Bush will meet allied leaders for the first time since his re-election in November.

“I think you may find that at the NATO meeting at the end of February we get an agreement on help for training the Iraqi security forces,” Blair said.