Bombs in Iraq, but Bush says “don’t despair”

By Gideon Long

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Bombs ripped through three Iraqi cities
on Monday and two senior officials survived assassination
attempts, hours after President George W. Bush told Americans
not to despair over the U.S. mission in Iraq.

A German woman hostage freed on Sunday was safe and well in
Baghdad, but an Iraqi militant group posted an Internet video
claiming to show the killing of an American abducted this
month.

Partial results from last week’s parliamentary election
suggested the Islamist Shi’ite alliance which forms the
backbone of the current government had done well, and might win
an outright majority in the new assembly.

Alliance officials said that even if that happened, the
bloc would try to bring in minority Kurds, Sunni Arabs and
secular parties to ensure a broad-based, representational
government.

The level of violence has risen again since the successful
and largely peaceful poll on December 15, the first
parliamentary election since the war in which Sunni Arabs voted
in strength.

In the latest attacks, a suicide car bomber targeted a
convoy carrying an Iraqi police colonel in the Iskan district
of Baghdad. Two civilians were killed by the blast, which left
the smoking wreckage of eight cars strewn across a street. The
colonel, two bodyguards and five civilians were wounded.

In another district, gunmen fired on the convoy of
Baghdad’s deputy governor Ziyad al-Zawbai. Three of his
bodyguards were killed and Zawbai was wounded.

Attackers also set off bombs in Basra, Iraq’s second
largest city, wounding three bodyguards of an adviser to the
defense minister, and in Miqdadiya, 90 km (56 miles) northeast
of Baghdad, wounding four civilians.

“DON’T GIVE UP”

The latest bloodshed came hours after Bush made an
unusually direct personal appeal to Americans in a televised
address.

“I do not expect you to support everything I do,” Bush said
in his fifth speech devoted to Iraq since November 30. “But
tonight I have a request: Do not give in to despair, and do not
give up on this fight for freedom.”

Faced with low approval ratings and wide public discontent
with the rising U.S. death toll in Iraq, the president hailed
the election as a sign of progress in the war and occupation
that costs U.S. taxpayers $6 billion a month.

Germany, which opposed the U.S.-led invasion of 2003, said
43-year-old archaeologist Susanne Osthoff was safe in Baghdad
after being held hostage since November 25.

While the Osthoff family feted her release, Americans had
more news of apparent U.S. victim of hostage-takers.

A militant group called The Islamic Army in Iraq posted a
video on the Internet showing a gunman firing repeatedly into
the back of a blindfolded man kneeling on the ground.

The group said the man was U.S. contractor Ronald Schulz.
The video was posted 11 days after the group said it had killed
him because the U.S. government had failed to meet its demands,
including the release of prisoners in Iraq.

No officials have confirmed the killing.

At least five other Western hostages — two Canadians, a
Briton, an American and a Frenchman — are believed to be held
in Iraq. Their fate remains unknown.

U.S. and Iraqi forces say they are making headway against
the Sunni Arab-led insurgency in a conflict that has killed
many thousands of Iraqis in the past three years and made life
dangerous and miserable for millions more.

On Sunday they began “Operation Moonlight,” a strike
against suspected militants along the banks of the Euphrates
river in Iraq’s vast western province of Anbar, near the Syrian
border.

Tackling the insurgency will be a key task for whatever
government emerges from factional bargaining after definitive
election results are announced in about two weeks.

Partial results showed the Shi’ite United Iraqi Alliance
(UIA) had won 58 percent of the vote in Baghdad against just 14
percent for former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, who had been
expected to mount a stronger challenge in the capital.

In its southern heartland, site of some of Shi’ite Islam’s
holiest shrines, the UIA appeared to have swept the board,
taking 10 times more votes than its nearest rival in Najaf
province and over six times more in Kerbala.

In the poor southern province of Maysan, it crushed its
opponents, taking over 20 times more votes than Allawi’s Iraqi
National List, which came second.

(Additional reporting by Mussab al-Khairalla, Aseel Kami,
Mariam Karouny, Deepa Babington and Alastair Macdonald in
Baghdad, Philip Blenkinsop in Berlin and Steve Holland and Adam
Entous in Washington)