Suicide car bombers slaughter 26

Two bombers in an explosives-laden vehicle veered into the path of the bus and blew it up outside a US military base near the town of Balad, north of Baghdad.

Just hours later, insurgents killed three policemen on patrol close to neighbouring Samarra and shot dead a member of the city’s governing council and his driver and bodyguard.

The attacks in the Sunni heartland, where loyalty to Saddam Hussein, the deposed dictator, runs strong, were the latest targeting Iraq’s fledgling security forces and government officials in a bloody campaign to scare voters away from the elections on 30 January.

A National Guard officer said the car bomb killed 25 soldiers on the way to their posts. A civilian bystander also died in the blast.

Relatives wept over the men’s bodies as they were placed in a local mosque. "My son, my son," one man wailed as he clutched a wooden coffin.

Officials ushered in the new year with warnings of an expected increase in pre-election assaults by insurgents trying to drive out US-led forces and topple Iraq’s American-backed government.

"Those responsible for this attack ... are trying to prevent democracy in Iraq," Major Neal O’Brien, a military spokesman in Tikrit, said. "They will not be successful."

On Saturday, the terrorist group al-Qaeda Organisation of Holy War in Iraq, led by the Jordanian al-Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, released a video of five Iraqi security men being shot dead in the street.

A statement posted with the video on an Islamist website vowed that the group would "slaughter" Iraqis who "collaborated" with foreign occupiers.

Yesterday’s bombing was the deadliest suicide attack against Iraqi security services since mid-September, when at least 47 people were killed outside a Baghdad police station.

Guerrillas have killed hundreds of security force members since the US-led invasion in 2003. Many Iraqis wonder how police and the National Guard will be able to protect voters when they can barely protect themselves.

Insurgents assassinated two local government officials in Diyala province, north-east of Baghdad, and a police major outside his home in Baghdad on Saturday.

Zarqawi’s group claimed responsibility for one of the deaths, that of Nawfal Abdul-Hussein al-Shimari, the head of Diyala’s governing council.

Yesterday, insurgents ordered all municipal workers out of the main local government building in the town of Sharqat, close to the volatile northern city of Mosul, and blew it up.

Meanwhile, the US announced that it had increased troop numbers in Mosul to provide security ahead of the elections. The city has seen stepped-up attacks on both American and Iraqi forces in the weeks since US troops captured the guerrilla stronghold of Fallujah in mid-November.

Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Hastings, a US military spokesman, said two brigade-sized units, consisting of Iraqi forces and elements of the 82nd Airborne Division, had joined 8,000 troops already in Mosul. Brigades can include between 2,000 and 4,000 soldiers.

"We want to make sure elections can be conducted and the high level of terrorist activity is eliminated," Lt-Col Hastings said.

Iyad Allawi, the interim Iraqi prime minister, told his country in a New Year’s Eve broadcast his government would do all it could to ensure voters’ safety, backed up by US-led troops and the new Iraqi security services.

Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader, and Islamist groups have pledged to wreck the poll.

Violence in the north and west may keep many people in Saddam’s once-dominant Sunni minority away from the polls. Sunni leaders are concerned that the new assembly may give exaggerated power to the Shiite majority.