BAGHDAD — A car bomb killed 17 persons and injured 21 in a mostly Shi’ite Muslim town south of Baghdad, and U.S. troops backed by tanks battled rebels in the country’s third-largest city yesterday.
In Kirkuk in the north, police said they were hot on the trail of Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist who has claimed responsibility for many of the worst attacks in Iraq, including the beheading of several foreign hostages.
“He came to Kirkuk from Mosul,” a source in the Kirkuk police department told Reuters news agency, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “There’s a possibility that he might be captured at any moment.”
There was no immediate comment from U.S. or Iraqi officials on the report. Iraqi officials recently said they were close to capturing the elusive militant, who is allied to al Qaeda. U.S. authorities are offering a $25 million bounty for his capture.
Meanwhile, election commission spokesman Farid Ayar said officials plan to announce the final results of the Jan. 30 vote today.
The car bomb exploded near the main hospital in Musayyib, a mostly Shi’ite town 35 miles south of Baghdad along the Euphrates River. The town is in a religiously mixed area that has been the scene of frequent attacks by Sunni Muslim insurgents.
It appeared the attack was part of a campaign by Sunni extremists against the country’s Shi’ites — an estimated 60 percent of Iraq’s 26 million people — who stand on the verge of a major election victory as officials finish the final vote tallies.
Another car bomb exploded in an eastern Baghdad neighborhood as a U.S. military convoy passed, killing an Iraqi woman and wounding three others but causing no American casualties, Iraqi police said. The bomb exploded about half a mile from a U.S. Army base.
More than 100 persons were killed last week in sectarian and insurgency-related violence, much of it targeting Shi’ite Muslims.
Mr. Ayar said on Al Arabiya television that the election commission would meet this morning to finalize some unspecified issues and announce the final figures in the afternoon. The results will be considered official after a three-day period.
“We will give three days to verify the results, hear any disputes, and then they will be officially declared final,” Mr. Ayar said.
Partial returns show a Shi’ite-dominated ticket endorsed by the Shi’ite clergy leading in the race for the 275 seats in the National Assembly. Shi’ite religious groups appear to have won control of provincial councils in wide areas of the country, including the two biggest cities, Baghdad and Basra.
Sunnis, an estimated 20 percent of the population, form the heart of the insurgency, and many of them boycotted the election.
Fears of sectarian violence prompted the Iraqi government to announce a five-day closing of the nation’s borders starting Thursday to protect worshippers during a major Shi’ite religious holiday, the Feast of Ashoura, that peaks next weekend.
During the feast last year, suicide bombers blew themselves up among crowds of pilgrims in Baghdad and Karbala, killing 171 persons.
In other incidents yesterday, fierce clashes broke out in the northern city of Mosul after American troops, responding to a mortar attack on one of their bases, were attacked with small arms and rocket-propelled grenades by insurgents inside a mosque, U.S. officials said.
The insurgents disabled a U.S. Army tank and a Stryker armored vehicle during the battle, which raged for hours around the mosque, Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla said. U.S. troops killed nine insurgents but suffered no fatalities, he said.
A woman died when a mortar round hit her house during the fighting, and another person was killed when a bomb exploded in another part of Mosul, hospital officials said.
Earlier in the day, Mosul police discovered the bodies of 12 men — six dressed in Iraqi national guard uniforms and six Kurdish security guards — dumped in two areas of the city.
Notes left near the bodies of the Iraqi guardsmen said, “This is the destiny for those who participated in besieging Fallujah,” referring to November’s U.S.-led assault on the insurgent bastion 40 miles west of Baghdad.
Insurgents mounted a major uprising in Mosul during the Fallujah assault, forcing American and Iraqi commanders to rush troops to the northern city after the entire 5,000-member police force deserted.
Also yesterday, a roadside bomb blasted an American military convoy, killing an Iraqi bystander but causing no U.S. casualties, a police official in the town of Youssifiyah said.
In Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city, two gunmen assassinated a prominent Iraqi judge who served under ousted dictator Saddam Hussein. The judge, Taha al-Amiri, was the former chief jurist on Basra’s highest criminal court and was among several former Ba’ath Party figures killed in the city during the past 18 months.
Suspicion has fallen on Shi’ite extremists seeking revenge for Saddam’s oppression of the majority-Shi’ite community.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.