Priest Is Abducted Amid Attacks in Iraq

Brazen insurgent attacks flared from one end of this nation to the other, authorities said Monday, targeting Iraqi security forces north of the capital and polling places in the southern city of Basra. Militants also kidnapped the Catholic archbishop of the northern city of Mosul.

The attacks across Iraq killed at least 28 Iraqi police and soldiers. Early today, a bomb exploded outside an office of a major Shiite party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, in the capital’s Jadriya neighborhood, and U.S. authorities said two Marines had been killed in action Monday in western Iraq.

Wire services said a suicide driver and at least one other person were killed in today’s explosion. Witnesses said it was a car bombing, like the Dec. 27 attack on another Supreme Council office in the same neighborhood.

The strikes Monday and today suggested that Sunni Muslim rebels battling the U.S.-backed Iraqi interim government were intensifying their assaults in advance of nationwide elections set for Jan. 30.

The top U.S. general here said Monday that the daily carnage was unlikely to abate soon.

“Is there going to be violence on election day? There is,” Gen. George W. Casey, who heads U.S.-led multinational forces in Iraq, acknowledged in a statement. “The enemy we’re fighting is not 10 feet tall, but he’s resourceful and he’s persistent.... Violence will stay at about the same level for some time.”

The declaration by Casey, who seldom addresses the press corps here, appears to be consistent with recent Bush administration moves to downplay expectations that the elections will stanch the bloodshed.

In recent days, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz have stressed the likelihood that attacks will continue and may even become more fierce.

Wolfowitz, speaking in Jakarta, Indonesia, said it was impossible to guarantee “absolute security” against the “extraordinary intimidation that the enemy is undertaking,” news agencies reported.

U.S. strategists are aware that milestones such as the capture of deposed President Saddam Hussein 13 months ago and the return of Iraqi sovereignty seven months ago have failed to stem the violence. Nor has the U.S.-led retaking of former rebel enclaves in the largely Sunni cities of Fallouja and Samarra knocked out the insurgency.

Still, Casey predicted, the voting “will be a great victory for the Iraqi people.” About 300,000 troops and police, including U.S., Iraqi and multinational forces, will provide security on election day, the general said.

As Casey outlined plans for additional security, the Vatican confirmed that Archbishop Basile Georges Casmoussa, 66, a leader of the ancient Syrian Catholic Church, an arm of the Roman Catholic Church, was kidnapped Monday in Mosul.

Casmoussa reportedly was seized as he walked outside his church in the largely Sunni city, which has become a hotbed of violence, authorities said.

The kidnapping was the latest assault on Iraq’s small Christian minority, which has been the target of church bombings, assassinations, abductions and other violence since the U.S.-led overthrow of Hussein helped embolden religious extremists in this overwhelmingly Muslim nation. Tens of thousands of Christians have fled Iraq and many more plan to leave the land where their ancestors have lived for a thousand years, community leaders say.

Pope John Paul II’s spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, said: “The Holy See deplores in the strongest terms this ignoble terrorist act and demands the immediate return of the pastor, Msgr. Casmoussa, unharmed, to his ministry.”

Though insurgent attacks have been concentrated in Baghdad, Mosul and the nation’s Sunni heartland, rebels have recently demonstrated anew an ability to strike in the relatively peaceful south, where the majority Shiite population generally supports the electoral process. Shiites, long suppressed under Hussein, a Sunni, are widely projected to be the big winners in the Jan. 30 balloting.

Sunni resentment at a perceived U.S. bias toward Shiites and ethnic Kurds is fueling tensions in Iraq and throughout the Arab world, which is largely Sunni, and helping provide recruits for the insurgency, authorities say. Some Sunni clerics and political groups have called for a boycott of the elections.

Against that backdrop, a possible insurgent offensive in the Shiite-dominated south on election day could wreak havoc on the electoral process and cause large-scale loss of life.

Authorities reported Monday that mortar fire had targeted four sites designated as polling places in Shiite-dominated Basra, Iraq’s second-most populous city. Witnesses said the shells hit several of the schools Sunday but no one was seriously injured.

“I heard an explosion so I went out to check what was happening,” said Abbas Abdul-Rusoul Jassim, 36, a resident of Basra’s Mishraq neighborhood. “I discovered that the ... kindergarten was the target.”

Two aides of Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the nation’s most influential Shiite cleric and a major backer of the elections, were assassinated last week, media reports said. The son of another pro-Sistani cleric was reported killed Sunday in the southern town of Numaniya.

Associated Press reported Monday that 17 people were killed Sunday in attacks along a main highway linking Baghdad to the south.

Masked militants have been setting up checkpoints on the southbound roads and executing people, officials say.

Monday’s violence included two attacks on Iraqi police and army units north of the capital, in which 14 security officers were killed and 32 were injured, the U.S. military said. Iraqi security services, perceived as collaborators by insurgents, are frequently targeted by militants. Hundreds have been killed and many others have been intimidated into leaving their posts.

A car bomb killed seven Iraqi police officers and wounded 28 others when it exploded outside a police station in Baiji, an oil refinery center about 150 miles north of the capital.

Farther south, near the restive city of Baqubah, seven soldiers were killed and four were wounded when insurgents attacked with rocket-propelled grenades and small arms.

Associated Press quoted a U.S. military spokesman as saying Marines had suffered casualties Monday in a suicide car bombing in Ramadi, a Sunni stronghold 60 miles west of Baghdad. It was unclear whether that was the incident that killed the two Marines.

Also in Ramadi, AP reported, officials discovered the bodies of five civilians and one Iraqi soldier, all denounced as collaborators in handwritten notes. Two were beheaded, their bodies left on a sidewalk with notes identifying them as Shiites.

Times staff writers Tracy Wilkinson in Rome and Louise Roug in Mosul, special correspondents Othman Ghanim in Basra and Salar Jaff in Baghdad, and a special correspondent in Numaniya contributed to this report.