Voting is predicted in violent Iraqi cities

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More than half of the voters in Iraq's most violent cities will be able to participate in the Jan. 30 election, a senior U.S. military commander said yesterday, even as U.S. officials shied away from predicting turnout for the critical vote.

Marine Lt. Gen. John Sattler told reporters that voting will proceed in both Fallujah and Ramadi, Sunni Muslim strongholds where violent opposition to the U.S.-led invasion and the interim Iraqi government has been strongest.

"It is our goal to make polling places available so that the preponderance of the [about 500,000 eligible] voters there would, in fact, have the opportunity to vote," said Gen. Sattler, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in al Anbar province.

Terrorists continued a campaign of intimidation ahead of the vote, as the Baghdad headquarters of Iraq's biggest Shi'ite Muslim party was struck by a suicide bomber. Gunmen also killed three candidates, including two from the alliance led by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.

An American soldier was killed in a roadside bombing in Baghdad, but, in a bit of good news, a Catholic archbishop kidnapped Monday in northern Iraq was released unharmed.

Turnout has emerged as a key barometer of the success of the Jan. 30 vote, in which more than 100 parties are vying for slots in the 275-seat transitional national assembly. The assembly will draft a new constitution, appoint a president and meet until a permanent government is voted in by the end of the year.

Surveys by the District-based International Republican Institute and other groups have found that a majority of Iraqis want to vote. The al-Mada newspaper this week published a poll indicating that two-thirds of Baghdad's 5 million residents planned to vote.

But terrorists and insurgent groups have vowed to derail the vote, and some leading Sunni Muslim groups have urged a boycott out of a fear that their political power will be curbed severely.

A strong overall turnout -- and a respectable level of participation by Sunnis -- would be major victories for the Bush administration, but U.S. officials steadfastly have refused to offer hard benchmarks for success.

With Iraq emerging from more than two decades of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, the United States and its coalition allies argue that any reasonably free election would be a huge step forward.