IRAQ: US Defence Secretary Mr Donald Rumsfeld said US troops, celebrating Thanksgiving after some of their bloodiest weeks in Iraq, should brace themselves for even more losses as they pursue insurgents bent on wrecking an election scheduled for January.
The US assault on the Sunni Muslim city of Falluja has already made November the second-deadliest month of the war for Americans, Pentagon figures showed.
With time running out to quell rebellion among Saddam Hussein's Sunni minority before the vote, a close aide of al-Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was captured in Mosul. And US, Iraqi and British forces seized 81 suspected insurgents south of Baghdad, including at country villas used by Saddam's old elite.
"No doubt attacks will continue in the weeks and months ahead, and perhaps intensify as the Iraqi election approaches," Mr Rumsfeld told reporters in Washington.
As 138,000 US troops celebrated Thanksgiving Day with turkey dinners at bases across Iraq, Pentagon figures showed 109 service personnel have died here in the first 3½ weeks of the month. Only this past April had a higher death toll.
More than 50 US troops were killed attacking Falluja. In all, 1,230 have died since the invasion of Iraq 20 months ago.
Lieut Gen Lance Smith, whose command includes Iraq, said: "We are intent on trying to provide a secure and stable enough situation to be able to conduct nationwide elections in January. Now, I will not pretend that that's not a challenge."
The biggest Sunni party threatened to boycott the January 30th vote, dealing a blow to hopes for a broad national turnout that would legitimise the new assembly. The Iraqi Islamic Party complained the violence in Sunni areas made voting impractical.
Scattered and bloodied after Falluja, the Saddam loyalists and international Islamists accused of organising the revolt against the US-backed interim government nonetheless mounted attacks.
The US State Department said one of its employees in Baghdad had been shot dead on Wednesday in an attack claimed by Zarqawi's group on a website.
An Iraqi policeman was killed and nine people were wounded when two suicide car bombers attacked a police station and a convoy of US and Iraqi troops in Samarra, north of Baghdad - a city where US forces last month mounted the first of a series of offensives against Sunni insurgent strongholds.
US troops say they killed about 1,200 people at Falluja. As they comb the battered city they are finding vast stocks of weaponry. Marines reported their biggest find so far, in a mosque.
But officers played down remarks by an Iraqi minister that they had found a chemical weapons workshop - they said the chemicals seemed destined for making ordinary explosives.
Iraq's national security minister said a Zarqawi lieutenant, named only as Abu Said, had been detained in Mosul two days ago.
US commanders believe Zarqawi, a Jordanian Islamist who has claimed major bomb attacks and the beheadings of foreign hostages in Iraq, had significant operations in Falluja but was not in the city when US forces went in.