THE ELECTION: Allawi Predicts More Strife, but Says Voting Will Go On

By JOHN F. BURNS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 20 - The Iraqi interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, said Monday that he expected the election campaign across Iraq to feature an increasing number of attacks like the car bombings and roadside executions of election officials that killed at least 70 people on Sunday. But he vowed that the elections on Jan. 30 would proceed and that those responsible for attacks that sought to disrupt them would be defeated.

"As we get closer to the elections there will be an escalation in violence, and we anticipate, we expect, that similar attacks will be happening," Dr. Allawi said in an interview with a group of Western reporters at his heavily protected office in the Green Zone government compound in Baghdad. But he added, "We know we will pay a heavy price until we win, and we are going to win."

Dr. Allawi, 59, spoke as an official in Najaf, one of two Shiite holy cities that were bombed, announced that 51 people had been arrested in connection with the attack there, which killed 54 people, along with 13 others killed in a similar attack in Najaf's twin city, Karbala. The official count of those wounded in the bombings rose to at least 175.

Election officials in Baghdad, where three men working at a voter registration office were hauled from their car on Sunday morning, made to kneel on the pavement and shot in the head, said they had ordered an urgent review of security for nearly 7,000 election workers. Meanwhile, the election process gained pace as an eager crowd gathered to watch a young woman draw numbered balls from a plastic drum to determine the order in which 275 political alliances, parties and individuals would be listed on election ballots.

As the election loomed, testing Dr. Allawi's future as well as Iraq's, the interim prime minister sought to portray himself as an indispensable strong man and a secular antidote to the influence of religious parties. Although some analysts have said he is tainted by his association with the unpopular American occupying forces, Dr. Allawi argued that as a former member of governing Baath Party of Saddam Hussein, he was best equipped to defeat of the insurgency and to entice its members to work for democracy in Iraq.

He mixed warnings that American and Iraqi forces would "break the backs" of insurgents who refused recent peace feelers with an emphasis on reconciliation. He announced that the first of an estimated 300,000 people who fled Falluja ahead of the assault las month by American and Iraqi forces would be allowed to start returning later this week. A later announcement said some residents of the city's Al-Andalus neighborhood would begin returning Thursday.

Elsewhere, the daily violence took another heavy toll, with at least 13 people killed in insurgent attacks. Four men driving in a sport utility vehicle were killed by a roadside bomb at Ashaki, a town just south of the city of Samarra, where a major American offensive was mounted against insurgents in October. Agence France-Presse reported that the bodies, three of them apparently of foreigners, were picked up by other vehicles in the men's convoy.

In other attacks reported by Western news agencies, an Iraqi truck driver leaving an American base near Yethrub, north of Baghdad, was shot dead, and an Iraqi interpreter working for American troops was also shot dead in Salman Pak, south of Baghdad. An Iraqi woman was killed and several civilians wounded in a roadside bombing near Samarra. Other victims included three kidnapped Iraqi national guardsmen, who were found dead near Yathrib, a Turkish truck driver killed by a bomb near Tikrit, and two members of a political party set up by Wafiq al-Samarrai, an intelligence chief under Mr. Hussein, killed in Samarra.

The attacks on Sunday, which inflicted the worst death toll of any day since July, brought a chorus of outrage from leaders of Iraq's majority Shiites, many of whom blamed insurgents belonging to the Sunni minority for the attacks. Sunnis provided Iraq's leaders for generations up to the toppling of Mr. Hussein and face the possibility of a Shiite-dominated majority in a new national assembly.

The Shiite leaders' statements were echoed by Dr. Allawi. Although he is a Shiite, he has based his own election campaign on a slate of secular Shiite and Sunni candidates that appears poised to be one of the stronger rivals to a powerful alliance of Shiite religious parties that many Iraqis regard as the early favorite in the elections. Dr. Allawi said it was clear that the insurgents wanted the attacks "to create ethnic and religious tensions, problems and conflicts," on a pattern that he said fitted closely with videotaped exhortations to Iraq's insurgents from Al Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden.

But facts on who was behind the bombings were few. The Najaf governor, Adnan al-Zurufi, said at a news conference that those arrested in the city after the bombing included mostly people from Najaf, but included one non-Iraqi Arab. In an interview later with an Iraqi reporter for The New York Times, the city's police chief, Ghalib al-Gzaari, said two men had confessed to being "in contact" with the intelligence agencies of Syria and Iran. He said one of the men was filming the bombing site when the explosion occurred.

There was no independent confirmation of the claims that there had been a foreign hand in the attacks. But the fact that the claims have surfaced so early in the campaign suggested that the question of foreign interference would be a volatile issue.

Already, a growing number of moderate Sunni politicians have made a target of Iran, saying that its ruling Shiite clerics plan to use the Shiite religious parties to make Iraq a catspaw for Iranian domination. Those claims were mocked on Monday by Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was reported by Iranian state television as having said the Najaf and Karbala attacks were carried out by the United States and Israel as "a plot aimed at distracting Iraqis so they miss the election."

Dr. Allawi, chosen by the American occupation authority as interim prime minister in June partly because of his reputation as a hardknuckle politician, depicted himself in the interview as a reluctant draftee for the post, with no pressing ambition in the elections beyond a desire to see Iraqis move beyond what he described as the "tyranny" of Mr. Hussein and, now, of the insurgents. In a well-tailored gray suit and blue-striped shirt, he appeared quietly confident, and said he intended to campaign across the country, defying insurgent threats.

"They are masked," he said. "We cannot be masked."

But he appeared somewhat burdened by the hazards of the job. Outside his office in what used to be a reception room for Mr. Hussein's Ministry of Military Industrialization, the scene was a testament to a man under threat: heavily armed American bodyguards with cradled weapons, armored Mercedes-Benz limousines, an American Bradley fighting vehicle with a mounted machine gun, electrically operated barriers, high concrete blast walls and circling American attack helicopters.

"It's very tiring, it's very exhausting, it's very dangerous," Dr. Allawi said. "Every day, I face two or three assassinations attempts." He added: "But we have to put the country back on its feet. Somebody has to do it. But I assure you, it's horrible."

Quickly, he shifted the mood, noting that his secular beliefs, not the theocratic ambitions of religious parties, are best attuned to Iraq's tradition of secular rule. He said he kept in close contact with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most powerful Shiite cleric, who helped cobble together the fractious coalition of Shiite religious parties known as the United Iraqi Alliance. But he said he believed that Ayatollah Sistani would remain neutral in the campaign. "Never in its history was Iraq run by religious groups," he said.

But his instinct for toughness emerged from the interview as the quality that Dr. Allawi appeared to regard as his strongest suit. He said Iraq needed "strong leadership" of the kind he gave in approving the American-led assault on Falluja. He said he had met recently "outside and inside" Iraq with men closely linked to the insurgency, and that he had spoken to them as a former Baathist and a conspirator in the 1968 coup that brought the party, and eventually Mr. Hussein, to power. His message, he said, was that Baathism "is dead, it's finished, it's something like the ex-Soviet bloc," and that the only future for the party was to abandon the insurgency.

He said that since the crushing of the insurgents in Falluja and their scattering to other parts of Iraq, his government had begun to see the beginnings of a "divide," between insurgents fighting a rear-guard action on behalf of Baathism and Mr. Hussein, and the "terrorists" like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who he said were beyond negotiation. He said that this presented new political opportunities, and that his discussions with men involved with the insurgency, had convinced him that many of them were fighting because they felt dispossessed by the American dismantling of Mr. Hussein's forces, and by the de-Baathification program that denied them a return to a "normal life."

"This is something I am adamant to fix," he said.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company