U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he thinks the attacks in Iraq are ``getting worse'' because insurgents are trying to prevent Iraqi democracy by disrupting national elections scheduled for the end of January. ``We know that the opposition does not want there to be elections and that they'll do everything they can to try to stop it,'' Rumsfeld said, according to a transcript of an interview with WCHS radio in Charleston, West Virginia. Violence in Baghdad and other parts of the country has led some leaders, including United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, to question whether credible elections can be held by then. The Bush administration and Allawi insist the violence won't stop the vote from taking place. The interim government is making ``serious progress in defeating the extremists'' who continue to attack parts of the country, Allawi said today in a televised speech to an audience at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
One of the coalition soldiers and the two Iraqi police officers were killed in a car bombing near a checkpoint outside a U.S. base in western Baghdad at about 9:45 a.m., the military said. Three U.S. soldiers and 10 Iraqis were wounded in that attack. In a separate incident, a coalition soldier was killed and seven were wounded when insurgents attacked a logistics base on the outskirts of Baghdad, the military said. The soldier died as a result of ``indirect fire,'' when a rocket exploded, the U.S. said. Earlier this week in a raid on a Baghdad site, the U.S. military said it found enough bomb-making material and weapons to stage ``multiple terrorist attacks.'' The discovery included a bomb-rigged moped.
The U.S. also said it bombed an insurgent target in Fallujah, west of the capital. U.S. forces carried out an air strike on a building it described as a ``known terrorist safe house'' in the northeast of the city, according to another e- mailed statement. The house was used by terrorists linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the military said. Three people were killed and six wounded in the air raid, AFP reported, citing Al-Hakim Al-Badrani, a doctor at the city's main hospital. An Iraqi Health Ministry spokesman said in a telephone interview he couldn't provide details of casualties from the raid. ``Significant secondary explosions were observed during the impact, indicating a large cache of illegal ordinance was stored in the safe house,'' after the 4:57 a.m. strike, the U.S. military said. The raid inflicted ``yet another blow to the Abu Musab al-Zarqawi terrorist network,'' it said. The U.S. has carried out numerous air raids on Fallujah, including at least seven in the past 10 days, against targets it says are linked to Zarqawi. The U.S. believes the repeated strikes have been ``very successful,'' First Lieutenant Lyle Gilbert, a military spokesman, said by e-mail from Fallujah. ``We've taken out a significant number of anti-Iraq forces engaged in various terrorism- and insurgency-related activities,'' Gilbert said by e-mail. ``In support of the interim Iraq government, we will continue to eliminate the anti-Iraqi forces at every opportunity.'' In the northern city of Mosul, a car bomb killed four people and injured 16, Qatar's al-Jazeera television reported. Details of the Mosul blast weren't immediately available