Insurgents kill at least 19 Iraqis in rural area

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Suspected Sunni Arab insurgents killed at least 19 electric-power-plant employees and poor Shiite Muslim laborers during a rampage in a rural, religiously mixed stretch of the country, officials said Friday.

A loose coalition of political leaders, meanwhile, pushed forward with an attempt to derail the nomination of interim Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari to a full term in his post. Kurds, Sunnis and a secular bloc led by former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi are trying to persuade the leading Shiite Muslim bloc to withdraw al-Jaafari's name.

Calm prevailed throughout the country for the most part during the Muslim day of worship as officials imposed a daytime curfew until 4 p.m. to prevent mosque gatherings from turning into potentially explosive political rallies.

Border police announced the arrest of a suspect wanted in connection with the bombing of the Abqaiq refinery in Saudi Arabia earlier this week. Ali Abdulla Salih Harbi, of unspecified nationality, was detained with five other men in the desert near the Saudi border, said a spokesman for the border police.

Authorities in the northern city of Kirkuk found the bodies of two police officers from the Sunni Arab city of Tikrit. The officers, each showing signs of torture, had been abducted several days earlier. Two bodies were found near Iskandariya, part of a patchwork of poor Shiite and Sunni villages south of Baghdad.

In the day's most grisly incident, more than 50 gunmen attacked an electricity substation in Nehrawan, near Baqouba, killing nine employees and injuring two power-plant guards, police said.

As U.S. and Iraqi troops arrived, the gunmen withdrew toward brick factories in the mixed Sunni and Shiite area between Baqouba and Baghdad and killed 10 Shiite factory workers.

On the political front, al-Jaafari's opponents need at least some Shiite legislators to defect in order to scuttle his nomination. Kurds and Sunnis widely view him as ineffective and too sectarian.

Shiites have maintained a united front behind al-Jaafari, who secured his coalition's nomination by a one-vote margin among its 130 members of the 275-seat parliament. But in recent days, cracks have begun to emerge in the alliance, which has the backing of Iraq's highest Shiite religious leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

At Friday prayers in Najaf, Ayatollah Mohammed Yaqoubi, spiritual leader of one of the Shiite parties in the coalition, criticized al-Jaafari as well as other members of the country's political class.

"The prime minister leaves the country burning and goes to Turkey, while national leaders usually break their trips and go back home when an incident takes place in their country," he told worshippers, referring to a trip taken during the tumult that followed the Feb. 22 bombing of a Muslim holy site. "As for the leaders of the political blocks, they have been meeting not to lift obstacles, and solve complications, but only to blame others."

Other Shiite members of parliament privately have expressed worries that the issue could harm the alliance's strategic partnership with Kurds.

"Flying gunships"

moving into Iraq

AN AIR BASE IN IRAQ — The U.S. Air Force has begun moving heavily armed AC-130 airplanes — the lethal "flying gunships" of the Vietnam War — to a base in Iraq as commanders search for new tools to counter the Iraqi resistance.

An Associated Press reporter saw the first of the turboprop-driven aircraft after it landed at the airfield this week. Four are expected.

The Iraq-based special forces command controlling the AC-130s, the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force, said it would have no comment. But the plan's general outline was confirmed by other Air Force officers.

Military officials warned that disclosing the location of the aircraft's new base would violate security provisions of rules governing media access to U.S. installations.

The gunships were designed primarily for battlefield use to place saturated fire on massed troops.

The Associated Press