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Iraqis traumatized by violence barely heeded the US election on Wednesday as a suicide bomber attacked a US checkpoint near Baghdad airport and kidnappers seized five more foreigners, including an American.
During vote counting before President Bush clinched victory over Democratic challenger John Kerry, many Iraqis kept their television sets tuned to Ramadan religious programs.
"Will Kerry turn occupation into liberation? No. Has Bush kept his promises? No. Whoever wins we will be at their mercy," said Raad Fadel, selling musical instruments in Baghdad.
Bush's deadliest Islamic enemy Osama bin Laden said the US president had dragged America into a quagmire in Iraq and warned for the first time of retaliation for Iraqi deaths.
"Bush's hands are sullied with the blood of those on both sides just for oil and to employ his private companies," the al Qaeda leader said in a full Internet broadcast of a video aired in part by Arabic Al Jazeera television last week. "Remember that for every action, there is a reaction."
Hungary and the Netherlands said they would withdraw their troops from a US-led multinational force in Iraq by March.
Before Kerry conceded defeat, US Marines watched television coverage of the Bush-Kerry contest at a base near Falluja, west of Baghdad.
"A Bush win would mean we would stay the course in Iraq. A Kerry win means we would probably leave before the job is done," said 1st Lieutenant Tony King, 33.
First Lieutenant Sara Hope, 24, had only one thought in mind: "I am leaving in March no matter who wins."
Attacks and kidnappings have intensified as Marines step up pressure on Falluja and Ramadi before an expected offensive to retake rebel cities to enable elections to go ahead in January.
A suspected suicide bomber blew up his vehicle on the main road to Baghdad airport, killing an Iraqi security man and wounding seven civilians, witnesses and hospital staff said.
The US military said there were no American casualties in the attack on the approach to a US checkpoint that controls access to the international airport in southwest Baghdad.
Bodies under bridge
Reuters photographs showed soldiers loading a corpse in a black bag into a military ambulance. A US spokesman at the airport later said it was the body of an Iraqi security man.
American soldiers were also photographed collecting body parts from the debris-strewn scene in pink plastic bags.
The explosion reduced the four-wheel-drive vehicle apparently used by the suicide bomber to a charred heap of twisted metal. Two other cars were burned and damaged.
An Interior Ministry spokesman said river patrol police had found three unidentified bodies under a bridge across the Tigris on Tuesday. He said they were mutilated but could not confirm an earlier report that they had been decapitated.
Al Jazeera said militants had beheaded three Iraqi National Guards that a previously unknown group accused of spying for US troops in Iraq and helping arrest insurgents.
The channel aired footage showing three men with a masked man behind them, but did not broadcast the beheadings.
A US embassy spokesman said he had no word on the three bodies, or on a US-Lebanese contractor named Radim Sadiq who was seized in Baghdad's western suburb of Mansour on Tuesday.
He said the embassy also had no information on an American national kidnapped along with a Filipino accountant and a Nepali from their Saudi company's office in Mansour on Monday.
Four Jordanian truck drivers were kidnapped in western Iraq on Tuesday, a Foreign Ministry official in Amman said.
Another militant group said it beheaded a man it called a senior member of Iraq's armed forces in the northern city of Mosul and posted a video of the killing on its Web site.
The Army of Ansar al-Sunna accused the officer, Major Hussein Shunun, of helping US forces against insurgents.
The Care International charity that employs British-Iraqi captive Margaret Hassan said it was distressed by the latest video issued by her kidnappers and urged them to free her.
The tape showed Hassan -- seized by unidentified kidnappers in Baghdad on Oct. 19 -- fainting on camera with water thrown at her to revive her, a witness who saw the tape told Reuters.
Hassan's unidentified captors threatened to turn her over to a group led by al Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi within 48 hours unless British troops quit Iraq, Al Jazeera said.
Zarqawi's group has claimed responsibility for hostage beheadings and some of Iraq's bloodiest suicide attacks.
Gunmen killed an Oil Ministry official, Hussein Ali, as he left his home in Baghdad, the Interior Ministry spokesman said.
No Iraqi oil was flowing from a northern pipeline to Turkey after this week's sabotage attacks, shipping sources said.
(China Daily via agencies November 4, 2004)
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