Iraqis delay meeting as kidnappings rise

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Iraq authorities abruptly put off Thursday a national conference of political, religious and civic leaders considered a crucial step on the road to democracy amid rising violence and disarray over choosing delegates and boycott threats by key factions.

Marines battled insurgents in Fallujah and separate attacks killed two coalition soldiers, while the terror kidnappings continued with a group saying it had seized a Somali truck driver and threatened to behead him.

The delay came a day after a car bombing killed 70 people, the worst single attack since U.S. officials transferred power to an interim Iraqi government.

The national conference, which had been scheduled to start Saturday, appeared to be far behind schedule even before the two-week delay was announced. No venue had been disclosed and there were no outward signs in Baghdad of preparations for the 1,000-person gathering.

Conference organizers insisted they were ready to start, but they agreed to the postponement at the request of U.N. officials, who wanted time to encourage wider participation and prepare for the meeting.

Officials hope the conference, which is to elect an interim national assembly, will give Iraqis faith in their government and isolate the insurgents who have carried out a 15-month campaign of bombings, assassinations and kidnappings.

One insurgent group linked to Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said Thursday it had kidnapped a Somali truck driver and would behead him if his Kuwaiti company did not stop working in Iraq. Another group threatened to behead one of seven foreign truck drivers it was holding in 24 hours if its string of demands, which included a pullout by their company, were not met.

Also Thursday, a U.S. soldier was killed in clashes north of Baghdad, and a Polish soldier died in a roadside bombing. The American’s death raises the number of U.S. personnel killed in Iraq since the war began to at least 909, according to an Associated Press tally.

Marines and Iraqi troops engaged in an hourslong battle later Thursday with insurgents in the volatile city of Fallujah, the military said. Witnesses reported hearing more than 60 mortar rounds fired toward the eastern edge of the city, where Americans are based, and planes flying overhead.

The military said the fighting began when insurgents attacked a joint patrol of Marines and Iraqi troops with gunfire, mortars and rocket propelled grenades. The troops responded with gunfire, tank fire and aircraft bombing raids, which hit a building the insurgents had fled to, the military reported.

Marines said they suffered no casualties. Four guards working in factories that were bombed were lightly wounded, said Dr. Tha’er Abdullah, of Fallujah General Hospital.

The violence came a day after a car bombing at a police station in Baqouba, north of Baghdad, killed 70 Iraqis. At one of the funerals for the dead, scores of silent men marched through the streets Thursday carrying a coffin holding the body of Kamal Qadouri, while a few men fired Kalashnikovs in the air. When the procession reached Qadouri’s home, women wailed in grief.

Meanwhile, Iraq’s interior minister said police in raids to crack down on insurgents have arrested 270 suspects, mostly from neighboring Arab countries. Some of the militants were Syrian and Iranian, Falah Hassan al-Naqib told the London-based Asharq Al-Awsat daily.

“I can confirm that 90 percent of those who carried out suicide operations are not Iraqis,” al-Naqib said. U.S. officials had long blamed foreign fighters of playing a role in Iraq’s 15-month-old insurgency, but recently the military has said the fighters are mainly loyalists of deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

In a video aired Thursday on Al-Arabiya television, a group calling itself “The Holders of the Black Banner” said it would behead its seven captive truck drivers – three Kenyans, three Indians and an Egyptian – if their Kuwaiti employer didn’t quit Iraq and the hostages’ countries didn’t pull out all their citizens.

Insurgents have taken more than 70 foreigners hostage in recent months in an effort to force their countries to withdraw troops and to hamper reconstruction work.

Organizers of the national conference had expressed concern that the gathering would be a magnet for terror attacks. But they said Thursday that security worries played no part in their decision to delay.

“We have full confidence in our security organizations,” said Fouad Masoum, head of the conference’s organizing committee.

The three-day conference is to bring together 1,000 delegates from Iraq’s 18 provinces to help choose a 100-member interim assembly with the power to approve the budget, veto executive orders, appoint Cabinet replacements and help guide the country toward elections in January.

Under a law promulgated by the outgoing U.S. occupation authority, the conference was to have been held by the end of July.

Masoum said Thursday that the United Nations had asked for a delay to persuade resistant factions to attend, and the organizers agreed.

Several important groups, including radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s movement and The Association of Muslim Scholars, an influential Sunni group with links to insurgents, have refused to attend. And on Wednesday, the Iraqi Islamic Party, the first Sunni party to join the now dissolved interim governing council, said it was withdrawing.