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U.S. Forces Intensify Preparations For Iraq Vote

Jan-29-2005 » Filed Under: 1/25 SBCT

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By Steve Fainaru, Washington Post

MOSUL, Iraq, Jan. 28 -- The U.S. military moved Iraqi security forces and voting materials to polling sites throughout Iraq, ramping up preparations for Sunday's parliamentary elections in the face of insurgent violence that left five American soldiers and 10 Iraqis dead on Friday.

The round-the-clock activity amounted to a nationwide logistical offensive, with U.S. troops enforcing "no roll" bans on vehicular traffic, helping to seal national and provincial borders, and providing concrete barriers, coiled razor wire and guidance on security at polling sites.

The massive effort, dubbed Operation Founding Fathers, has not resolved widespread uncertainty about the elections, and in some ways has intensified it. In Baghdad, two roadside bombs killed four American soldiers, and small-arms fire killed another. The capital grew deserted under a blanket of security. U.S. tanks appeared in the streets, and Apache attack helicopters and combat jets flew overhead in a pre-election show of force.

In the northern city of Mosul, insurgents spread graffiti -- some of it on walls at polling sites -- threatening to behead voters, and they sprayed gunfire at Iraqi security forces protecting polling stations. At one site, Arab and Kurdish security forces who were supposed to be working together were not talking. [...]

In Mosul, a tour of six polling sites in the southeast quadrant revealed a broad spectrum of preparedness. At one elementary school, Iraqi security forces had laid out shiny new concertina wire at both ends of a courtyard and used it to line a path to the building where voting would occur. Inside, two rooms had been cleaned and equipped with cardboard voting booths, two pens to mark ballots already in place. Plastic ballot boxes and even new boxes of Kleenex had been neatly set on tables for election workers. Soldiers had set up machine-gun nests on top of the building and across the street.

At another school, Kurdish soldiers with the Iraqi Intervention Force and Arab soldiers with the Iraqi army were in separate buildings, feuding while election materials and concertina wire sat untouched. A lieutenant with the Iraqi Intervention Force complained to Lt. Col. Michael Gibler, commander of the 3rd Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment of the Stryker Brigade Combat Team, which has operational responsibility over the area, that the Iraqi soldiers had refused to provide identification upon arrival at the site. Many of the soldiers are former members of the Iraqi National Guard, which was believed to have been infiltrated by the insurgents.


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