5 Blasts, 7 Dead: Havoc Returns to Metropolis

Five explosions rocked various parts of the Iraqi capital Monday, killing at least seven people and wounding 30 while tying up traffic and spreading fears of a new upsurge in violence.

At least one U.S. soldier was also killed in Baghdad when his patrol vehicle was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade, the military said. In western Baghdad, two U.S. pilots died in a helicopter accident, the military announced. It gave few details but said no hostile fire was involved.

The blasts were caused by two suicide car bombs, two remote-controlled car bombs and a possible motorcycle bomber. Though they signaled no great strategic or tactical strides, the attacks demonstrated the continued potency of Iraq’s Sunni Arab-led rebellion, which has picked up after a lull following the Dec. 15 parliamentary election. It was hoped that the exercise in democracy would help draw the minority Sunni Muslim population away from violence and into mainstream political life.

Instead, the election has proved highly divisive. The latest partial returns, which on Monday included out-of-country votes and the ballots of police, soldiers, emergency workers and prisoners, suggested that Islamist Shiites and Kurds will together surpass the two-thirds majority of seats necessary to form a government. In January, the two groups formed a coalition that has run the government on an interim basis this year.

Sunni Arabs and secular candidates are likely to receive most of the remaining 80 or so seats in the 275-person legislature.

According to the results, which are expected to be finalized early next month, the faction around former interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, a candidate favored by Washington, will get about 25 of those seats. It appears to have earned about 8% of the popular vote.

Shiites and Kurds, who have similar aims as parties to a decades-long alliance against Saddam Hussein and the perceived tyranny of his now-deposed government, are set to win 190 seats between them. Their victory was far-reaching. The United Iraqi Alliance -- a coalition of Shiite religious parties with ties to Iran -- even won a plurality of votes among Iraqis in the U.S., more than doubling Allawi’s American total.

Election officials said they would continue investigating fraud allegations. The election commission was examining 950 ballot boxes, each with about 500 votes, from various parts of the country and abroad. Supporters of Allawi and the Sunni coalitions have alleged systematic voter fraud.

Investigators have determined that fraud occurred in three polling centers in Istanbul, Turkey, and plan to invalidate those votes, an election commission official said. A television station run by the leading Shiite coalition will be fined for broadcasting disinformation shortly before the election.

But international election officials have already begun dismissing the protests after the vote as attempts to placate dismayed constituents and bolster losing parties’ bargaining positions in the formation of a new government. Foreign diplomats have begun counseling Allawi’s deputies and the Sunnis to stop complaining and start cutting deals with the Shiite and Kurdish victors for executive posts.

“The election was pretty credible under the circumstances,” said Craig Jenness, the top United Nations advisor to the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq and a veteran international observer. “I certainly don’t see anything that would suggest that there was massive fraud in these elections.”

Commission spokesman Farid Ayar dismissed the allegations as typical postelection posturing. “The politicians always play like that after all elections, the winners and the losers,” Ayar said.

The election panel also confirmed that it would implement a commission order to remove from election slates former officials of the Sunni-dominated Baath Party, which controlled Iraq under Hussein. Such an action would add insult to the injuries of the Sunnis and nationalists who fared poorly in the election.

Large sections of Iraq are still grappling with the insurgency fueled by Sunni Arabs. On Monday, the mayor of Baqubah in Diyala province survived a roadside bomb that targeted his convoy. A colleague and his driver were killed, said the mayor, Raad Tamimi, in an interview.

Monday’s bombings in Baghdad, though not as deadly as some of the catastrophic attacks on civilians, bore eerie hallmarks of earlier spates of violence. The explosions set cars and nearby buildings ablaze. With each blast, the capital erupted with the sirens of emergency vehicles and the roar of U.S. helicopters.

Most of the attacks appeared to target Iraqi police patrols. The four car bombs occurred in quick succession during the morning, two of them in the middle-class Shiite district of Karada.

The apparent motorcycle bomber struck near a police station by a crowded market in a mostly Shiite district of eastern Baghdad, damaging shops while killing two people and injuring 16, police said.

A special correspondent in Baqubah contributed to this report.