During vote counting before President
Bush clinched victory over Democratic challenger John
Kerry, many Iraqis kept their television sets tuned to
Ramadan religious programs.
"Will Kerry turn occupation into liberation? No. Has Bush
kept his promises? No. Whoever wins we will be at their mercy," said Raad Fadel,
selling musical instruments in Baghdad.
Bush's deadliest Islamist enemy Osama bin Laden said the U.S. president had dragged America into a quagmire in
Iraq and warned for the first time of retaliation
for Iraqi deaths.
"Bush's hands are sullied with the blood of those on both
sides just for oil and to employ his private companies," the al Qaeda leader
said in a full Internet broadcast of a video aired in part by Arabic Al Jazeera
television last week. "Remember that for every action, there is a reaction."
Hungary and the Netherlands said they would withdraw their
troops from a U.S.-led multinational force in Iraq by March.
Before Kerry conceded defeat, U.S. Marines watched
television coverage of the Bush-Kerry contest at a base near Falluja, west of
Baghdad.
"A Bush win would mean we would stay the course in Iraq. A
Kerry win means we would probably leave before the job is done," said 1st
Lieutenant Tony King, 33.
First Lieutenant Sara Hope, 24, had only one thought in
mind: "I am leaving in March no matter who wins."
Attacks and kidnappings have intensified as Marines step up
pressure on Falluja and Ramadi before an expected offensive to retake rebel
cities to enable elections to go ahead in January.
A suspected suicide bomber blew up his vehicle on the main
road to Baghdad airport, killing an Iraqi security man and wounding seven
civilians, witnesses and hospital staff said.
The U.S. military said there were no American casualties in
the attack on the approach to a U.S. checkpoint that controls access to the
international airport in southwest Baghdad.
BODIES UNDER BRIDGE
Reuters photographs showed soldiers loading a corpse in a
black bag into a military ambulance. A U.S. spokesman at the airport later said
it was the body of an Iraqi security man.
American soldiers were also photographed collecting body
parts from the debris-strewn scene in pink plastic bags.
The explosion reduced the four-wheel-drive vehicle
apparently used by the suicide bomber to a charred heap of twisted metal. Two
other cars were burned and damaged.
An Interior Ministry spokesman said river patrol police had
found three unidentified bodies under a bridge across the Tigris on Tuesday. He
said they were mutilated but could not confirm an earlier report that they had
been decapitated.
Al Jazeera said militants had beheaded three Iraqi National
Guards that a previously unknown group accused of spying for U.S. troops in Iraq
and helping arrest insurgents.
The channel aired footage showing three men with a masked
man behind them, but did not broadcast the beheadings.
A U.S. embassy spokesman said he had no word on the three
bodies, or on a U.S.-Lebanese contractor named Radim Sadiq who was seized in
Baghdad's western suburb of Mansour on Tuesday.
He said the embassy also had no information on an American
national kidnapped along with a Filipino accountant and a Nepali from their
Saudi company's office in Mansour on Monday.
Four Jordanian truck drivers were kidnapped in western Iraq
on Tuesday, a Foreign Ministry official in Amman said.
Another militant group said it beheaded a man it called a
senior member of Iraq's armed forces in the northern city of Mosul and posted a
video of the killing on its Web site.
The Army of Ansar al-Sunna accused the officer, Major
Hussein Shunun, of helping U.S. forces against insurgents.
The Care International charity that employs British-Iraqi
captive Margaret Hassan said it was distressed by the latest video issued by her
kidnappers and urged them to free her.
The tape showed Hassan -- seized by unidentified kidnappers
in Baghdad on Oct. 19 -- fainting on camera with water thrown at her to revive
her, a witness who saw the tape told Reuters.
Hassan's unidentified captors threatened to turn her over to
a group led by al Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi within 48 hours unless British
troops quit Iraq, Al Jazeera said.
Zarqawi's group has claimed responsibility for hostage
beheadings and some of Iraq's bloodiest suicide attacks.
Gunmen killed an Oil Ministry official, Hussein Ali, as he
left his home in Baghdad, the Interior Ministry spokesman said.
No Iraqi oil was flowing from a northern pipeline to Turkey
after this week's sabotage attacks, shipping sources said.
