Iraq Slates National Elections for Jan. 30 By MAGGIE MICHAEL, AP BAGHDAD, Iraq (Nov. 21) - Iraq's Electoral Commission on Sunday set national elections for Jan. 30, and a spokesman said ballots would be cast nationwide, including in areas now wracked by violence. Iraqis will go to the polls to choose a national assembly, which will among other things draft a permanent constitution. The vote is seen as a major step toward building democracy after years of rule by Saddam Hussein. Farid Ayar, spokesman of the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq, said areas still beset by violence - including the insurgent strongholds of Fallujah and Ramadi, as well as northern Mosul - will participate in the elections. "No Iraqi province will be excluded because the law considers Iraq as one constituency, and therefore it is not legal to exclude any province," he said. Elsewhere, the U.S. military said that Iraqi and U.S. forces have detained more than 1,450 people in connection with the Fallujah offensive. More than 400 detainees have already been released after being deemed to be non-combatants. Northwest of Baghdad, U.S. forces conducted a raid to capture a "high value target" associated with Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in an area northwest of Baghdad, a U.S. spokesman said Sunday. Three people were detained. Late Saturday, Marines conducted a "limited-scale" raid to disrupt insurgent activities in the Haqlaniyah area, about 135 miles northwest of Baghdad, said 1st Lt. Lyle Gilbert. Three people were detained and a weapons cache was confiscated, Gilbert said. He did not specify whether any of the three was the "high value target" that U.S. forces were seeking. Eyewitnesses said U.S. troops raided a Sunni mosque Saturday night, arresting its cleric - Douraid Fakhry - and detaining dozens of residents in nearby homes during a sweep of Haqlaniyah. The U.S. military denied that a mosque was raided in the area. Sunday was the first time a date for national elections was set; the commission was charged with choosing a date before the end of January. Iraqi voters will choose representatives for a 275-member national assembly, provincial councils and the national council for Kurdistan. Ayar said that 122 political parties out of 195 applications were accepted and registered for the elections. The commission has asked the United Nations to send international monitors for the elections. Ayar said the number of U.N. experts who have already arrived in Iraq is around 35, but said "we need as many monitors as possible." The raid on the mosque in the Haqlaniyah area comes as part of the government campaign against some hardline Sunni clerics whom the government accuse of fueling the insurgency in Iraq and of using their mosques as stores for weapon caches. On Friday, Iraqi and U.S. forces raided Baghdad's Abu Hanifa mosque - one of the country's most important Sunni mosques. Al-Zarqawi is believed to have escaped from Fallujah during the U.S. offensive on the guerrilla stronghold that began Nov. 8. Violence has spiked dramatically in Sunni Muslim areas throughout the central and northern regions of Iraq even as the U.S. military operation against the rebel stronghold of Fallujah winds down. A suicide car bomber attempted to kill the police chief of Hillah by ramming his car into Gen. Qais Abdullah's vehicle, police said Sunday. Capt. Hadi Hatif said the attacker's car detonated before it made contact, killing only the bomber in the Saturday incident. Abdullah was on his way to work when the attack happened in this central Iraqi town about 60 miles south of Baghdad, Hatif said. A day earlier, another suicide bomber exploded his car outside the Jabal police station in Hillah, targeting the police commander. Only the bomber died. Iraqi and U.S. forces have begun security operations in several areas around the country - including northern Mosul - in an attempt to control insurgent activity. A joint operation by Iraqi police and National Guards in Baghdad and central Babil province will be launched this week against insurgents operating in a belt of cities south of the capital, police said Sunday. The towns of Haswa, Latifiya, and Mahmoudiya, some 25 miles south of the capital, have been a major area of insurgent activity where U.S. and Iraqi forces have come under repeated attacks by car bombs, rockets, and small arms fire. The region has become known as a "triangle of death" for many Shiite Muslims, Westerners and members of the Iraqi security services, many of whom have become the victims of Sunni Muslim insurgents and criminal gangs. Meanwhile, an explosion Sunday near a Shiite mosque in the central Iraqi city of Kufa injured one person, an officer said. A subsequent raid of the mosque grounds netted a weapons cache believed to belong to a Shiite militia. The blast, apparently from a homemade bomb, detonated as a worker searched through the trash near the al-Kufa mosque, said Lt. Aquil Jawad of the Iraqi National Guard. Iraqi security troops sealed the area and searched the mosque grounds. A cache of 20 rocket-propelled grenades, five mortar rounds and a missile was uncovered in a yard behind the mosque, Jawad said, adding the weapons likely belonged to the Shiite militia. There was no damage to the mosque in the explosion and it was not immediately clear if the bomb was placed in the trash on purpose. The Mahdi army, loyal to the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, battled U.S. and Iraqi troops in this region until a peace deal was negotiated in August. The twin cities of Kufa and Najaf, 100 miles south of Baghdad, contain some of the Shiite Muslim world's holiest sites. 11/21/04 07:16 EST

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