Iraq Chief Gives a Sobering View About Security

October 6, 2004
PREMIER'S SPEECH

By EDWARD WONG

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Wednesday, Oct. 6 - In his first speech before the interim National Assembly here, Prime Minister Ayad Allawi gave a sobering account on Tuesday of the threat posed by the insurgency, saying that the country's instability is a "source of worry for many people" and that the guerrillas represent "a challenge to our will."

Hours later, the American military said it had launched its second major offensive of the last week, sending 3,000 troops, some of them Iraqis, in a sweep across the Euphrates River south of Baghdad. Led by the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, the troops overran a suspected insurgent training camp and detained 30 suspects, the military said in a written statement. They also seized control of a bridge believed to be part of a corridor allowing insurgents to move between strongholds in central Iraq, the military said.

The push followed a much larger and deadlier weekend offensive in the insurgent-controlled city of Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad. American and Iraqi officials have been saying they intend to take back rebel territory this fall to lay the groundwork for general elections scheduled for January.

The operation on Tuesday took place in northern Babil Province, a region that once served as a munitions-production base for the old Iraqi Army and has become a field of loosely knit insurgent cells in towns like Mahmudiya and Latifiya.

Bisecting the area is Highway 8, a crucial north-south artery nicknamed the Highway of Death because dozens of people have been ambushed and killed in small market towns along its length by insurgents and bandits.

In his speech, Dr. Allawi, who has cast himself as a tough leader since taking office in late June, insisted that elections would go ahead in January as planned, but he acknowledged that there were significant obstacles standing in the way of full security and reconstruction. The nascent police force is underequipped and lacks the respect needed from the public to quell the insurgency, he said, and American business executives have told him that they fear investing in Iraq because of the rampant violence here.

His tone was a sharp departure from the more optimistic assessment he gave to the American public on his visit to the United States last month. At his stop in Washington, Dr. Allawi made several sweeping assertions to reporters about the security situation in Iraq, including saying that the only truly unsafe place in the country was the downtown area of Falluja, the largest insurgent stronghold, and that only 3 of 18 provinces had "pockets of terrorists."

He did not directly contradict those statements on Tuesday, but his latest words reflected a darker take on the state of the war.

"It is true that the security situation in our country is the first concern for you, and maybe for your inquiries, too," Dr. Allawi said in the 100-member National Assembly, which asked him combative questions after his speech in the nearly hourlong session.

The insurgents "are today a challenge to our will," he continued. "They are betting on our failure. Should we allow them to do that? Should we sit down and watch what they are doing and let them destabilize the country's security?"

Though Dr. Allawi joined President Bush last month in boasting of having 100,000 fully trained and equipped Iraqi policemen, soldiers and other security officials, he acknowledged Tuesday that there were difficulties in creating an adequate security force.

"It's clear that since the handover, the capabilities are not complete and that the situation is very difficult now in respect to creating the forces and getting them ready to face the challenges," he said.

He added that "the police force is not well equipped and is not respected enough to lay down its authority" without backing from a strong army.

Dr. Allawi's talk, given inside the fortified government headquarters on the west bank of the Tigris River, comes at a crucial juncture for the American enterprise in Iraq. Insurgents have stepped up a deadly campaign of car bombings and assassinations even as American-led forces push back into guerrilla territory. The successes of the American offensives in Samarra and Babil Province will ultimately depend on whether the Iraqi security forces can combat the insurgency on their own after the American troops withdraw to their bases.

At stake now are the scheduled elections, which will appear legitimate only if there is a large voter turnout. In recent months, experts have voiced increasing doubts about the ability to hold such elections, given the instability here.

A nationwide poll of 3,500 Iraqis just completed by the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies shows that the number of Iraqis who say they are "very likely" to vote in the elections has dropped to 67 percent, from 88 percent in June. About 25 percent say they will "probably" vote. The poll has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.

More than 52 percent of those polled said they would not vote for a candidate who was not from their ethnic, religious or linguistic group.

Violence flared up in other areas on Tuesday. Two car bombs exploded in the city of Ramadi, an insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad, killing four Iraqis and igniting a gun battle between insurgents and American soldiers, The Associated Press reported.

At noon, a car bomb exploded next to a military convoy in the northern city of Mosul, killing at least three civilians riding in a car behind the convoy, the American military said. Right after the explosion, insurgents ambushed the convoy with rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire. Four soldiers were wounded and taken to a military hospital in Mosul.

Police officials in Mosul said Tuesday that they had discovered four headless bodies. The bodies were those of a local woman and her family, the officials said. The woman was running a prostitution house and was apparently decapitated, along with her relatives, by a fundamentalist Islamic group, they added.

Several mortar blasts rocked Baghdad in the morning. One shell landed at a passport office in the center of the city, wounding one person seriously, the police said. The mortar had been fired from a vehicle driving along a highway.

Hospital officials in Sadr City, a vast slum in northeast Baghdad that is overwhelmingly hostile to the American occupation, said one person had been killed in an overnight airstrike by the Americans. For weeks, the military has been deploying an AC-130 gunship and fighter jets over the area to try to rout the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to the firebrand Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

The airstrikes continued late Tuesday night and early Wednesday, with explosions and the jackhammer sound of the AC-130's cannons heard for miles around.

Dr. Allawi said at his appearance on Tuesday afternoon that he had met earlier in the day with leaders in Sadr City and that the two sides were working to reach an agreement to end the presence of heavy arms in the area. In the evening, he appeared on Iraqi television and said local sheiks had agreed to allow the police to patrol Sadr City. But a senior Sadr aide, Abdul Hadi Daraji, said in an interview that the Sadr organization had not agreed with some of the conditions laid out by the government.


An Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Mosul for this article.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company