VIOLENCE: 5 Bomb Attacks Kill 26 as Vote by Iraqis Nears

By JOHN F. BURNS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 19 - Insurgents detonated five powerful truck and car bombs across Baghdad on Wednesday, killing 26 people, at least 9 of them members of Iraq's fledgling security forces. The attacks came as Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, said he would reveal plans next week for an accelerated buildup of those forces to prepare for an eventual American withdrawal.

Responding to political pressures within Iraq ahead of the Jan. 30 elections and mounting questions in Washington about the prospects for an American pullout, Dr. Allawi said he had been talking with the United States commanders in Baghdad about ways to accelerate the "training, equipping and deploying" of Iraqi security forces.

He added that "this in turn will accelerate the drawdown and gradual withdrawal of the multinational forces in Iraq." Those forces are made up of about 150,000 troops from the United States and upward of 25,000 from other nations.

But Dr. Allawi raised the tantalizing prospect of an eventual American withdrawal while giving little away, insisting that a pullout could not be tied to a fixed timetable, but rather to the Iraqi forces' progress toward standing on their own. That formula is similar to what President Bush and other senior administration officials have spoken about.

Some American military commanders have said privately that with this approach and considering the demoralization, desertion and unwillingness to fight common among Iraqi forces trained so far, American troops could be tied down for years, unless elections or other political developments bring the war to an unexpected end.

"I will be explaining this carefully planned process - what I call a 'conditions based' rather than a 'calendar based' gradual withdrawal program, in more detail next week," Dr. Allawi told reporters at a ceremony at Baghdad airport.

He was there to accept the first of three C-130 military transport planes that Iraq is to receive as part of the American-financed buildup of Iraqi forces. The aircraft was the first large plane acquired by the new Iraqi Air Force, which was one of the most powerful in the Middle East before it was decimated by bombing attacks in the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

Dr. Allawi's remarks were made on a day when attacks underlined, once again, how insurgents have turned wide areas of the country, including Baghdad, into what is effectively enemy territory, with an ability to strike almost at will, and to shake off the losses inflicted by American troops.

The attacks in Baghdad on Wednesday were aimed at the approaches to the Australian Embassy and four Iraqi security targets, including a police station, an army garrison and a bank where policemen were lining up to receive their monthly pay.

The attacks, four of them within 90 minutes in the morning rush hour, rattled windows and doors miles away. Spread across a wide area of the city, they wounded dozens of people, most of them Iraqi civilians, in addition to those killed, and served as a reminder of the insurgents' power to spread mayhem across the capital only 11 days before the elections.

American commanders have sought to prepare public opinion in Iraq and abroad for one of the bloodiest chapters in the war so far, saying the escalation of violence promised by the insurgents can be diminished to a degree, but not prevented, by an increasing tempo of American military raids on insurgent groups.

The American hope is that the voting, for a national assembly and provincial councils, will help turn the tide by drawing a strong turnout among more than 14 million eligible voters, despite the threat of attacks by Sunni insurgents on polling stations, candidates and voters, and a boycott of the election being urged by powerful figures in regions where Iraq's Sunni minority population predominates.

In almost any foreseeable outcome of the election, the Sunnis face the prospect, for the first time in centuries, of ceding political power in Baghdad to the country's 60 percent Shiite majority.

Wednesday's deadliest attack occurred near a police station and Al Alahi hospital in the Alwiyah district of eastern Baghdad. The American command said a suicide car bomber killed 18 people, including 5 Iraqi policemen, and that 15 other people had been wounded.

In a car bomb attack on an Iraqi military garrison on the site of Baghdad's old Muthana inner-city airfield and another attack at a checkpoint on the perimeter of the heavily secured Baghdad International Airport, two Iraqi soldiers and two security guards were killed.

The first attack, shortly after 7 a.m., involved a truck packed with explosives that approached concrete barriers guarding the Australian Embassy compound in southern Baghdad. The American command said two Iraqis were killed.

A spokesman for the American command, Lt. Col. James Hutton of the First Cavalry Division, said that none of the bombers Wednesday had reached their intended targets.

"While any loss of life is tragic, it could have been a lot worse," he said. Nevertheless, at the worst of the bombing sites there were deep craters, pools of blood, scattered human remains and shattered buildings.

Near the Rafidain bank in the Etifiyah neighborhood of north-central Baghdad, where a bomb went off as policemen lined up for their salaries, a crumpled child's bicycle lay near the center of the blast; people there said a boy had been killed.

The new United States-trained Iraqi Army, National Guard and police force have had hundreds of men killed in the past year.

Now, American election plans depend on these forces protecting more than 5,500 polling places.

The insurgents' threats to Iraqis seen as working for or alongside the Americans were demonstrated on Wednesday in a video posted on an Islamic militant Web site of the killing of two Iraqi telecommunications technicians.

The video showed the men, still alive, posed in front of a black banner emblazoned with the name of an Islamic terrorist group, Ansar al Sunna, that has claimed responsibility for many of the most brutal attacks of the war in the past year.

They were then shown crouching before a stone wall, blindfolded, as their executioner approached from off camera and killed them with pistol shots to the back of the head. Earlier, the men confessed that they had been sent to the northern cities of Mosul and Erbil on an American contract to install computer communications for the elections.

At least 11 other people were killed on Wednesday. Gunmen who attacked the Baghdad offices of a major Kurdish party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, killed one party member and wouned others, party officials said.

Also in Baghdad, another car bomb aimed at an American convoy missed its target but killed four Iraqi bystanders. In Hilla, 60 miles south of Baghdad, an Iraqi policeman was killed in a car bombing, according to a Polish military spokesman. Much of the remaining violence was in northern Iraq, in Erbil, Dohuk, Kirkuk and Mosul.

Khalid al-Ansary contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Mosul.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company