Powell Rejects Annan’s Doubts on Elections

Violence flared Friday in the Iraqi capital and American warplanes pounded the insurgent bastion of Fallouja, but Secretary of State Colin L. Powell predicted U.S.-led forces would bring the country under control in time for milestone elections scheduled for January.

“There’s no reason this election can’t be held,” Powell said in an interview with the Washington Times. “The major problem we’re facing right now is the insurgency, and it has to be dealt with.”

The secretary of State was responding to U.N. Secretary- General Kofi Annan’s comment that “credible elections” could not be held under current security conditions.

Insurgents exploded a car bomb Friday at a Baghdad police checkpoint -- again targeting Iraqi forces, who are expected to take on the lion’s share of security duties for the elections. Hundreds of Iraqi police, civil guardsmen and other security personnel, who are more vulnerable than U.S. or allied troops, have been killed as part of the insurgent strategy to prevent those they consider collaborators from imposing control.

Although there is a broad consensus that Iraq is not ready for elections yet, U.S. officials insist that it will be by January.

The Bush administration’s plan is to use military force along with the promise of millions of dollars in reconstruction projects to persuade leaders in places such as Fallouja to cooperate with the new government and the election process. In Fallouja alone, officials say, tens of millions in development projects have been held up because U.S. officials cannot safely go in to oversee them.

The plan is for Iraqi forces to provide most of the security by December, with U.S. forces as a backup. Offensives into Fallouja and other rebel enclaves are possible if there are no significant signs of improvement in coming weeks, commanders have said.

“We don’t expect to see the security situation as it exists on the 16th of September as the security situation that’s going to exist on the 31st of December or the 31st of January, whenever the elections are held,” Powell told the newspaper, according to a transcript released by the State Department.

“We know, and Prime Minister [Iyad] Allawi knows, that these areas have to be brought under government control, firmly under government control.”

U.S. troops are being killed almost every day, and large chunks of the country -- especially the Sunni heartland in central, western and northern Iraq -- remain out of full government control.

In Al Anbar province, a Marine was killed Friday while on patrol, the military announced.

A recent wave of hostage- takings of Westerners and others accused of collaborating with the U.S.-backed government has added to a sense of chaos.

Powell suggested in the interview that the allied experience last month in the southern city of Najaf, in which troops encircled and pressed insurgents while negotiations were conducted, could be duplicated elsewhere.

“You’re not destroying the insurgents; you’re squeezing them and moving them somewhere else,” Powell said. “And so you’ve got to keep doing it until they have nowhere else to go.”

However, though military officials have held up Najaf as a success story, the three-week battle there left much of its Old City in ruins. And the Shiite militia that battled U.S. troops there has, by most accounts, largely relocated to Sadr City, the sprawling eastern Baghdad neighborhood where gunfire erupts each evening and young men can be seen planting crude roadside bombs to attack American armored vehicles.

A senior U.S. military commander suggested recently that plans were being developed to destroy the Shiite militia in Sadr City “once and for all.”

More recently, U.S. officials have highlighted what they call the improving situation in the city of Samarra, north of Baghdad. Sunni Muslim militants have controlled Samarra for months and kept American troops out. Under an agreement with area sheiks, U.S. troops with the 1st Infantry Division returned to Samarra last week. A new city government and police chief were installed.

Representatives of the Iraqi government and U.S. commanders also have been meeting with religious and tribal leaders from Fallouja. But no deal has yet been struck to disarm militants in the largely Sunni Muslim city of 280,000 west of Baghdad.

Late Friday, U.S. officials said a “precision strike” near Fallouja hit a meeting of 10 fighters allied with Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant accused in a string of car bombings, assassinations and hostage-takings.

“There was no indication that any innocent civilians were in the immediate vicinity of the meeting location,” the U.S. command said in a statement, adding that a nearby mosque and school were spared damage.

Friday’s bombing followed strikes Thursday on at least three sites in the Fallouja area linked to Zarqawi, the military said. U.S. officials estimated that as many as 60 foreign fighters were killed in one village.

But hospital officials said the dead and wounded included women and children. The Iraqi Health Ministry put the number of dead at 44 and said at least 27 people were injured.

A Fallouja police officer, 1st Lt. Zaid Abdalsatar, said that neither Zarqawi nor any foreign fighters were in Fallouja. “The American claims have no reality or truth,” he said.

In central Baghdad, a suicide attacker drove his explosives-laden vehicle into a police checkpoint shortly after noon Friday, killing at least three people and wounding at least 20, authorities said. The bomber was targeting police vehicles blocking off Haifa Street, scene of frequent firefights in recent days.

Also on Friday, U.S. and Iraqi troops sealed Haifa Street, conducted house-to-house searches and arrested dozens of suspects, including a number of foreigners from other Arab nations, authorities said.

There was no word on how many of those arrested would be formally charged with participation in the insurgency.

Earlier in the day, a vehicle trying to crash into a checkpoint exploded when U.S. troops fired on it. The two suicide bombers were killed and one Iraqi national guardsman was injured.

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Times staff writer Ashraf Khalil in Baghdad and a special correspondent in Fallouja contributed to this report.