TIKRIT, Iraq, Jan 11 (AFP) - Six Iraqi policemen were killed Tuesday in a car bombing in Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, as the interim government said it has set aside 2.2 billion dollars to boost the security forces.
In other deadly strikes with elections less than three weeks away, at least five more Iraqis -- all but one of them civilians -- were killed in attacks targeting US and Iraqi security forces, police and hospital sources said.
Iraq's US-backed government has set aside 2.2 billion dollars, or 11 percent of this year's budget, to strengthen the security forces to deal with the intensifying insurgency, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said.
"We need to equip the police and army with the new modern weaponry," Allawi told a Baghdad news conference.
"When our forces are capable of taking over the war against the insurgents, we will be able to begin discussions with the multinational forces on the Iraq army taking over the lead role in maintaining security in Iraqi towns."
Tuesday's bombing against the police came a day after Baghdad's deputy police chief was assassinated.
The US military said the car bomb blew up near a police station in Tikrit, a bastion of Sunni Muslims loyal to ousted dictator Saddam Hussein north of the capital.
"As the Iraqi police continue to get stronger, and continue to pose a threat to the insurgents and terrorists, they will be targeted," said US military spokesman Major Neal O'Brien.
Jordanian Islamist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's group claimed it carried out the attack, in an Internet statement.
In the "triangle of death" south of Baghdad, three Iraqi civilians were killed and three wounded in a roadside bombing near Yussufiyah, witnesses and a hospital source said.
The bombing apparently targeted a US military convoy but the casualties were on a passing minibus, they said.
Elsewhere, an Iraqi soldier and a civilian were killed in an attack on an army patrol in the town of Samarra, some 125 kilometres (80 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.
The insurgency is being fanned in part by widespread concerns among the Sunni Arab elite, which dominated Saddam's regime, that the new parliament will be dominated by the long oppressed Shiite majority.
US President George W. Bush, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, said he was working to ensure the elections go ahead as planned on January 30, but warned the vote was only a "first step" towards a permanent government.
Bush, asked if there was a plan to bring the Sunni population into the future government if they do not vote, said the United States was working to ensure as high a participation as possible.
"We want there to be wide participation. We want there to be a government that is representative," Bush told the Wall Street Journal.
US embassy officials turned down an offer from prominent Sunni fundamentalist clerics who said they would lift calls for an election boycott among their embittered religious community if the Americans gave a timeline for their withdrawal from Iraq.
The United States is boosting troop numbers to 150,000 ahead of the poll. Top ally Britain, which already has around 9,000 troops in southern Iraq, announced Monday it would send in another 400 troops for a limited period.
US Lieutenant General Thomas Metz had warned that attacks might rise to more than 80 a day as insurgents try to sabotage the polls for a national assembly to draft a post-Saddam constitution.
But delegates from 20 countries, which met at a conference on Iraq in late November, called at a meeting in Cairo on Tuesday for elections to go ahead as planned.
Allawi insisted Monday his security forces were winning the battle against extremists, reeling off a list of captured militants including top leaders of Mohammed's Army, a hardline Islamist movement, and other rebel groups.
Two members of the premier's own Iraqi National Accord have been killed in the past 24 hours, bringing to 22 the number of his supporters slain over the past two months, party official Imad Shibib told AFP on Tuesday.
In Ankara, Turkish, Iraqi and US officials gathered to discuss regional security issues including ways of tackling Kurdish militants in northern Iraq, a source of tensions between Ankara and Washington.
Osman Koruturk, the chief Turkish foreign ministry official on Iraq, was joined by the US undersecretary of state for Iraq, Laura Kennedy, and the Iraqi deputy foreign minister, Hamid al-Bayati.
Discussions were to focus on the PKK -- acronym of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, which is also known as KONGRA-GEL -- whose activities Ankara wants US forces in Iraq to curb.
A joint statement said after the talks that Washington welcomes Turkish-Iraqi cooperation against the rebels and "underlines its commitment to work with Turkey ... in the struggle against the PKK/KONGRA-GEL across the world."
Three-way consultations on the issue will continue, the statement said.
In northern Iraq, an oil pipeline and a gas pipeline were set on fire in separate attacks near Kirkuk, officials said. The fire at the oil pipeline near the Zreita river raged for several hours before it was brought under control.
01/11/2005 14:59 GMT - AFP