Allawi Pressured to Avoid Coalition Attack on Fallujah
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Car bombs killed at least a dozen people in Baghdad and another major city yesterday as pressure mounted on interim Prime Minister Allawi to avert a full-scale American attack on the terrorist stronghold Fallujah.
There was no word on an American and two other foreigners abducted Monday in Baghdad, although the kidnappers freed two Iraqi guards also captured in the attack.
Kidnappers of aid worker Margaret Hassan threatened to turn her over to Al Qaeda-linked terrorists notorious for beheading hostages unless Britain agreed within 48 hours to pull its troops from Iraq, Al Jazeera TV reported yesterday.
Al Jazeera broadcast a portion of a video showing a hooded gunman, and without sound. No group has claimed responsibility for Mrs. Hassan’s kidnapping and the broadcast showed no sign of any banner identifying who held her.
In London, Prime Minister Blair’s office and the British Foreign Office both declined to comment on the reported demand. Britain has 8,500 troops in Iraq, the second-largest contingent after America. In northern Iraq yesterday, saboteurs blew up an oil pipeline and attacked an oil well, violence that is expected to stop oil exports for the next 10 days, Iraqi oil officials said. Iraq’s oil industry, which provides desperately needed money for reconstruction efforts, has been the target of repeated attacks by terrorists.
At least eight people, including a woman, died early yesterday when an explosives-laden car slammed into concrete blast walls and protective barriers surrounding the Education Ministry and exploded in Baghdad’s Sunni Muslim district of Azamiyah.
In Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad, a car bomb exploded near a military convoy carrying an Iraqi general, killing four civilians, and wounding at least seven soldiers.
Iraqi police said the attack was an assassination attempt on Major General Rashid Feleih, commander of a special task force, who was not injured. General Feleih was apparently on his way to a news conference to talk about the role of the task force, according to police and press reports. The violence came as American forces prepare for a major offensive against Fallujah and other Sunni terrorist strongholds north and west of Baghdad in hopes of curbing the insurgency so that national elections can be held in January.
American forces have pounded insurgent positions around Fallujah almost daily, but American officials say the go-ahead for an all-out assault must come from Mr. Allawi. However, new pressure mounted yesterday on Mr. Allawi, a Shiite Muslim, to forego an assault and to continue negotiating with the hard-line Sunni clerics who run the city, which has become a symbol of Iraqi resistance throughout the Arab world.
Mohammed Bashar al-Faidhi, spokesman of the Association of Muslim Scholars, said his clerical group would use “mosques, the media, and professional associations” to proclaim a civil disobedience campaign and a boycott of the January elections.
He said that a boycott call by the influential clerical group “will have a great resonance among the people of Iraq.” Such a call by Iraqi Sunnis would probably draw little support among the Shiite majority, believed to comprise about 60% of Iraq’s nearly 26 million people.