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Bombs in Iraq, but Bush says "don't despair"

Posted on: Monday, 19 December 2005, 12:19 CST

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)

Source: REUTERS

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