U.S. forces launch raids to secure troubled area for election

BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. forces carried out a series of raids in Iraq's troubled northern city of Mosul, the military said Sunday, as American and Iraqi authorities scramble to prepare for elections there in the face of mass resignations of polling staff and police.

A Bradley Fighting Vehicle was damaged Sunday in the city when an explosion occurred as a U.S. convoy passed by, witnesses said. It was unclear whether there were casualties.

U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz acknowledged that the security threat to the Jan. 30 election was worse than in last October's nationwide balloting in Afghanistan and that it was impossible to guarantee "absolute security" against the "extraordinary intimidation that the enemy is undertaking."

In the Mosul area, the U.S. Army's Stryker Brigade Combat Team detained 11 suspected insurgents, including an alleged cell leader, and seized weapons and bomb making material in several weekend raids - part of the military's strategy to try to secure the city short of launching an all-out offensive.

East of Mosul, a Katyusha rocket slammed into a home near the Kurdish regional parliament building in Irbil where leaders of the two main Kurdish parties were meeting to discuss the election, a police official said Sunday.

The Mosul area has emerged as a major flashpoint between U.S. and Iraqi forces and the insurgents, raising fears that the election cannot be held in much of the city, Iraq's third largest.

U.S. and Iraqi officials are scrambling to recruit new police and election workers in Mosul after thousands of them resigned in the face of rebel intimidation. A new police chief was appointed a week ago to command a force of barely 1,000. Last November the city had 5,000 police.

Similar mass resignations are believed to have occurred in other Sunni Muslim areas of northern, central and western Iraq.

"I would underscore that there was intimidation in Afghanistan - the Taliban threatened all kinds of violence against people who registered or people who voted," Wolfowitz told reporters Sunday in Jakarta, Indonesia. "But I don't believe they ever got around to shooting election workers in the street or kidnapping the children of political candidates."

Also Sunday, insurgents attacked an Iraqi National Guard patrol south of Baghdad, injuring two guardsmen, one of them critically, police Lt. Adnan Abdul-Allah said.

West of the capital, in the city of Ramadi, five explosions rocked a joint U.S.-Iraqi National Guard base, sending columns of smoke rising above the area, witnesses said. Sporadic clashes were reported in the city center.