Iraqi Security forces under attack

An Iraqi man throws a stone at a burning lorry, after a US convoy was caught in a road side bomb in the northern city of Mosul yesterday. No injuries were reported. PHOTO: AFP

With just five weeks to go to the January 30 election, a US newspaper reported that the administration of US President George W. Bush was seeking to guarantee top level jobs for the country's Sunni Muslim minority regardless of the vote result.

Bush on Saturday thanked US forces stationed in Iraq and other hotspots, just days after a suicide bomb blast on a US military base in northern Iraq that killed 22 people, including 18 Americans, and wounded more than 70.

Turkey, meanwhile, said it was doing its best to free one of the country's richest businessmen who has been missing for a week and is believed to have been abducted in Iraq.

Turkey's NTV news channel aired footage Saturday showing a man identifying himself as shipping magnate Kahraman Sadikoglu and saying he had been kidnapped.

"We have mobilized all our forces and are closely following the situation," Turkey's Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul was quoted by the Anatolia news agency as saying. "We will do whatever is necessary. We hope he is alive."

There was no indication either on who Sadikoglu's kidnappers were or whether they had any demands, but some media reports suggested that the militants had asked for a ransom of 25 million dollars.

The Turkish embassy in Baghdad refused any comment Sunday.

Violence was unrelenting as an officer in the civil defense forces and one of his assistants were gunned in Baghdad on Sunday, police said.

North of the capital, an Iraqi national guardsman was killed and a civilian wounded when a patrol hit a roadside bomb late Saturday between Samarra and Duluiya.

A senior administrator in the town of Al-Shurqat west of the northern oil city of Kirkuk was kidnapped as he was traveling to the northern city of Mosul, police said.

The latest deaths brought to at least 24 the number of people killed in bombings and assassinations since Friday including a massive explosion of a fuel tanker in Baghdad on Christmas Eve that claimed the lives of eight and damaged nearby embassies in the upscale Mansur neighbourhood.