BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqis traumatized by violence barely heeded the U.S. election Wednesday as a suicide bomber attacked a U.S. checkpoint near Baghdad airport and kidnappers seized five more foreigners, including an American.
After President Bush clinched victory over Democratic challenger John Kerry , one Iraqi in a Baghdad restaurant said it was time Washington altered course in Iraq.
"We hope the American president will change his policy toward Iraq...because Iraq is oppressed and can't remain occupied," Salem Shummari told Reuters Television.
During vote-counting earlier, 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 Islamist enemy Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) said the U.S. 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 U.S.-led multinational force in Iraq by March. Bulgaria said it will cut its military presence by 10 percent.
Before Kerry conceded defeat, U.S. Marines watched election coverage at their base near Falluja, west of Baghdad.
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.
AIRPORT ROAD ATTACK
A roadside bomb killed a U.S. soldier and wounded another at Salman Pak, just south of Baghdad, the military said.
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.
Reuters photographs showed soldiers loading a corpse in a black bag into a military ambulance. A U.S. spokesman at the airport later said it was the body of an Iraqi security man.
An Interior Ministry spokesman said river patrol police had found three unidentified bodies under a bridge across the Tigris 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 U.S. 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 U.S. embassy spokesman said he had no word on the three bodies, or on a U.S.-Lebanese contractor named Radim Sadiq who was seized in Baghdad's western suburb of Mansour Tuesday.
He also had no information on an American national abducted along with Filipino accountant Roberto Tarongoy, 31, and a Nepali from their Saudi company's office in Mansour Monday.
Four Jordanian truck drivers were kidnapped in western Iraq Tuesday, a Foreign Ministry official in Amman said.
Another militant group said it beheaded an Iraqi officer in the northern city of Mosul and posted a video of the killing on its Web site. The Army of Ansar al-Sunna accused Major Hussein Shunun of helping U.S. 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 captors threatened in the tape Tuesday 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.
"We are not going to make a public response," a British embassy spokeswoman said of the latest video. "The government's approach is well-established."
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.
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