Iraq's interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi said in London Sunday that elections would go ahead as scheduled in January despite unrelenting violence.

Allawi spoke after meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who described the unrest as "this new Iraqi conflict" whose outcome would also determine that of the struggle against global terror.

"Whatever the disagreements about the first conflict in Iraq to remove Saddam (Hussein), in this conflict now taking place in Iraq, this is the crucible in which the future of this global terrorism will be determined," Blair told a news conference.

"And either it will succeed and this terrorism will grow, or we will succeed, the Iraqi people will succeed, and this global terrorism will be delivered a huge defeat."

The violence in Iraq has taken some 300 lives in the past week and Baghdad, Allawi's seat of power since he was appointed in June, suffers almost daily street fighting, kidnappings and car bombings.

Last week, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned that there could not be "credible elections if the security conditions continue as they are now."

Voting is scheduled to take place January 31.

But Allawi said yesterday that "we definitely are going to stick to the timetable of the elections in January next year.

"We are doing our best to ensure that we will meet the time of the elections," he said. "We are adamant that democracy is going to prevail, is going to win in Iraq."

Allawi is in London en route to the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

Continued violence

A suicide attacker detonated a car bomb yesterday near a joint US-Iraqi checkpoint in the northern city of Samarra, killing three people and wounding seven, including four US soldiers , the military said.

One Iraqi soldier, a civilian and the suicide bomber died in the blast, said Major Neal O'Brien of the Army's 1st Infantry Division.

Four American and three Iraqi soldiers were also wounded in the explosion and evacuated to a nearby military hospital for treatment.

Meanwhile, US warplanes and artillery units fired on the insurgent-held city of Falluja overnight, killing four people and wounding six, hospital officials said yesterday.

An artillery barrage on an industrial area in Falluja early yesterday left two people dead and two others wounded, said Dr. Ahmed Khalil of the Falluja General Hospital.

Also, a statement posted yesterday on a Web site purportedly by Islamic militants claims to have beheaded three Iraqi members of the Kurdistan Democratic Party in the country's north for cooperating with American forces.

The authenticity of the statement, which was signed in the name of "Ansar al-Sunna Army," could not be verified.

An al-Qaeda linked group has threatened in a videotape to behead two Americans and a Briton within two days, and insurgents have carried out a new string of car bombings, killing at least 20 Iraqis and two American soldiers.

The videotape which surfaced on Saturday was the first word on the fate of Americans Jack Hensley and Eugene Armstrong and Briton Kenneth Bigley since the three construction contractors were kidnapped from their Baghdad home two days earlier.

(China Daily September 20, 2004)