BAGHDAD, Jan. 14 -- A Sunni Muslim insurgent group that has vowed to disrupt Iraq's Jan. 30 elections claimed responsibility Friday for the assassination of an aide to the country's most prominent Shiite Muslim religious leader.
In restive western Iraq, suspected insurgents abducted 15 Iraqi guardsmen and set fire to their bus.
A U.S. soldier patrols in Mosul in northern Iraq. Two U.S. soldiers were killed near the city Thursday, one by a roadside bomb that wounded three other soldiers.
(Zohra Bensemra -- Reuters)
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In other clashes, four U.S. soldiers were killed, the military said.
The killing of the cleric and the kidnappings of Iraqi guardsmen highlighted the fearsome tactics Iraqi guerrillas have employed to disrupt the vote, which will choose a parliament charged with writing the country's new constitution.
For months, elements within Iraq's insurgency have sought to inflame sectarian divisions in order to overwhelm the election. Iraq's fledgling and under-trained security forces, seen as crucial to an eventual American military withdrawal and the stability of an elected Iraqi government, have also been a frequent target.
In a statement posted on several Web sites used by insurgents, the radical group Ansar al-Islam claimed responsibility for killing the cleric, Mahmoud Madaeni. He was shot to death with his son and four bodyguards as he walked home from prayers Wednesday night near his house in Salman Pak, southeast of Baghdad. Madaeni was a local representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, whose support for the election has mobilized much of Iraq's Shiite majority.
Ansar al-Islam called Madaeni "one of the main supporters of the election" and reiterated its threats to target voters and candidates and to attack polling stations.
"God willing, the queues of booby-trapped cars will not stop," it said.
Sunni political leaders have insisted that the vote be delayed, saying that the threats and attacks will keep their supporters away from the polls. Shiite leaders and, less vocally, Kurdish parties have said the insurgency was unlikely to end soon and therefore nothing would be gained by a delay.
The U.S. military has predicted that attacks will escalate before the election, Iraq's first in decades. Time and again, insurgents have proved their ability to operate even in the most heavily populated Shiite areas of southern Iraq.
But the insurgents' main theater of operations is in Sunni-dominated central and western Iraq, where they enjoy substantial support and where turnout is expected to be low. The insurgents' authority is greatest in Anbar province, a sprawling region that stretches through western Iraq to the Syrian border, and in Iraq's third-largest city, Mosul, along the Tigris River in northern Iraq.
A bus carrying Iraqi National Guard members was ambushed Friday near the western city of Hit. The bus was torched and at least 15 guardsmen were seized, according to al-Arabiya, an Arabic satellite television network. The fate of the kidnapped men was unknown. The network said the attack occurred on the province's main east-west highway.
According to witnesses quoted by news agencies, the attackers opened fire with rocket-propelled grenades as the guard members were heading to a U.S. military base.
The Defense Ministry in Baghdad had no immediate comment.
Iraqi security forces have borne the brunt of attacks by insurgents, who consider them collaborators with the U.S. occupation. Their bodies -- sometimes burned, shot or dismembered -- often wash up on river banks or are dumped in streets.
In other attacks, insurgents fired rockets in the capital, although no injuries were reported, and an oil pipeline was sabotaged in the northern town of Baiji. Such attacks have crippled the oil-distribution network , home to the world's second-largest reserves, worsening a fuel crisis in Iraq.
The U.S. military said Friday that four of its troops were killed in clashes in western and northern Iraq.
Two Marines were killed Thursday in Anbar province, but a Marine spokesmen declined to specify where or how the attack occurred. Also on Thursday, two soldiers were killed near Mosul, one of them by a roadside bomb that wounded three other soldiers, the military said.
North of Baghdad, an M1-A1 Abrams tank collided head-on with a minibus carrying Iraqi civilians just after dawn. The military said the bus was trying to pass another car and could not swerve out of the tank's way. Six of the bus passengers were killed and eight injured, the military said in a statement.
