Gunmen attacked and set fire to a voting station in an Iraqi province that was once the heartland of Sunni Islamist resistance to the US invasion, police said four days before milestone local polls.
The voting station set up in a school in a remote area 10 km south of the city of Falluja in the western province of Anbar was unoccupied and nobody was hurt in the attack on Tuesday, said police major Ahmad Al Falluji.
"Our forces, after receiving information, headed to the site and put out the fire. There was no one inside," Falluji said. "We don't know who is behind it. We expect this was a group that is trying to disturb the peace of the electoral process."
Iraq holds provincial elections on Saturday that will test recent security gains and see whether the country is able to resolve disputes at the ballot box rather than through violence.
The sectarian slaughter and insurgency unleashed by the 2003 US-led invasion have finally begun to fade and Iraqi troops and police are taking on primary responsibility for ensuring the safety of voters while US forces remain in their barracks. The vote will select provincial councils that pick powerful governors in 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces, and may also give some insight into the political strength of Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki ahead of parliamentary elections later in the year.
Anbar, a vast desert region bordering Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, was once the main battleground for Al Qaida and other Sunni Islamist groups fighting US soldiers.
But the province's tribal chiefs turned on Al Qaida because of its harsh measures, and joined up with the US military. Anbar has been quite peaceful of late though analysts warn that tensions have been rising before the vote.
The province's mainly Sunni Arab population boycotted the last vote in 2005 and its local council was appointed.
Some of the tribal chiefs whose US-paid fighters took on Al Qaida have entered the race, and hope to defeat the incumbent councillors, many of whom belong to or are allied with the main Sunni Arab parliamentary bloc, the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP).
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Officials say a car bomb has exploded near a Kurdish party's office in the northern city of Mosul, killing at least three Iraqi soldiers only days before pivotal elections.
Nobody claimed responsibility for the attack, which occurred amid rising tensions as the Kurds and mainly Sunni Arabs have been jockeying for power in Saturday's provincial elections.
The blast occurred near the offices of the Kurdish Democratic Party, or KDP, which is headed by Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani.
An army officer said Iraqi security forces became suspicious of the vehicle, which blew up as a team approached to inspect it.
The officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorised to release the information, said two soldiers and a civilian also were wounded.
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Aswat al-Iraq: Iraqi army troops on Tuesday captured four gunmen from the self-styled Islamic State in Iraq in eastern Mosul, a military source said. "A force from the 3rd brigade of the Iraqi army on Tuesday (Jan. 27) arrested four al-Qaeda's Islamic state in Iraq gunmen," the source told Aswat al-Iraq news agency, noting that one of the detainees is a leader of the armed group. "They are residents of the Talafar district and one of them is wanted for perpetrating six murders in al-Karama neighborhood in eastern Mosul," he explained.
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Aswat al-Iraq: Joint police and army forces on Tuesday arrested two suspected gunmen during a crackdown operation in the north of Hilla city, said a police source. "Acting on intelligence information, joint police-army forces raided hideouts of gunmen in al-Ubeidi region in al-Mahaweel district, north of Hilla, where they arrested two suspected gunmen," the source told Aswat al-Iraq news agency.
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Aswat al-Iraq: Iraqi army troops on Tuesday captured four gunmen from the self-styled Islamic State in Iraq in eastern Mosul, a military source said. "A force from the 3rd brigade of the Iraqi army on Tuesday (Jan. 27) arrested four al-Qaeda's Islamic state in Iraq gunmen," the source told Aswat al-Iraq news agency, noting that one of the detainees is a leader of the armed group. "They are residents of the Talafar district and one of them is wanted for perpetrating six murders in al-Karama neighborhood in eastern Mosul," he explained.
Aswat al-Iraq: Joint police and army forces on Tuesday arrested two suspected gunmen during a crackdown operation in the north of Hilla city, said a police source. "Acting on intelligence information, joint police-army forces raided hideouts of gunmen in al-Ubeidi region in al-Mahaweel district, north of Hilla, where they arrested two suspected gunmen," the source told Aswat al-Iraq news agency.
