Officials said the elections are planned even in hot spots.

Officials said the elections are planned even in hot spots.
COMBINED DISPATCHES
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Iraq's Electoral Commission announced Sunday that Iraq will hold national elections Jan. 30, despite heavy violence throughout much of the nation and dozens of political and religious parties threatening boycott.
If held, the elections could be the closest thing to a fully democratic national selection process since the British ceded rule to a series of Iraqi kings, who were followed by revolution and dictatorship.
In Fallujah, the U.S. military, acting on information from a man who claimed to have escaped from militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's network, inspected a house where intelligence officers believe hostages were detained, tortured and possibly killed.
A Tawhid and Jihad banner -- the name of al-Zarqawi's organization until he changed it last month to Al-Qaida in Iraq -- was recovered from the home, as were several black face masks, volumes of documents, handcuffs and two long, apparently blood-stained knives, military officials said.
The elections would select a 275-member national assembly that would draft a permanent constitution. Presidential election would follow by the end of 2005.
Commission chair Hussein Hendawi said 198 parties and individuals already had filed to run and that 126 had been approved.
"It was a very large number and we feel proud about that," he said.
But at least 46 Iraqi religious and political parties have announced that they will not participate in the electoral process, many of them because of fighting in Fallujah.
Among them are some Shiite Muslims, including firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who has widespread support in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood, a slum of more than 2 million.
Some opposition
Iraqi officials have insisted that elections would be held by the end of January, in spite of violence in the country, and followers of Shiite leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al Husseini al-Sistani have suggested the country would risk widespread unrest in the elections weren't held by then.
But many leaders from the minority Sunni population have opposed the elections, saying they are being held too soon and have been structured in such a way that Sunnis, many of whom enjoyed privilege and power under Saddam Hussein, will be permanently disenfranchised.
Commission members said they planned to extend polling to even the most dangerous of Iraqi hot spots, including cities such as Fallujah and Ramadi to the west, and areas south of Baghdad, where carjackings and assassinations are common.
"The issue of security is left to the government, and that totally belongs to the government to decide which kind of forces they are use," said Safwat Rashid, a member of the commission. "We assume that Iraqi police and Iraqi national guard are enough to protect the polling stations."
Hendawi said international election observers would be welcomed, though it was unclear who would send them.
Findings at Fallujah site
On Sunday, howling dogs, clouds of flies and a somber patrol of Marine officers visited the squalid, two-story house on the edge of a dirt field in southern Fallujah.
The site is among nearly 20 found in Fallujah where insurgent atrocities are believed to have been committed. Maj. Jim West, intelligence officer for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said Sunday that some of the sites appear to have been used to hold Western hostages and others to torture or kill local people who disobeyed insurgents.
The Marine patrol also visited a second site Sunday that may have been another hostage holding area, this one in a building that contained a human-sized wire cage with an intravenous bag beside it, as well as windowless, dungeonlike rooms, one of which had bloody fingerprints inside.
This Sunni Triangle city was invaded by U.S. and Iraqi forces Nov. 8 in an effort to cripple an insurgency that has beheaded foreign hostages and waged a campaign of bombings and assassinations.
Led to the house
American intelligence officials said they were led to the house with the al-Zarqawi banner Friday by a man claiming to have escaped imprisonment there.
"He started talking, and it all just came out," said Capt. Raymond Pemberton, the intelligence officer for the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Infantry Regiment of the Army's 1st Infantry Division. The unit had been attached to the Marine Corps' 7th Regiment during the battle for Fallujah.
After viewing the house, speaking to Iraqi troops in the area and interviewing the informant -- whose background was not disclosed by intelligence officials -- intelligence sources said they believed Arab and Western hostages had been held in the home, perhaps including British hostage Kenneth Bigley, who was beheaded in early October.
As the Marine officers visited the two houses Sunday, accompanied by a few reporters, they carried maps, documents and photographs that itemized materials found in earlier inspections.
While intermittent gunfire rattled nearby and the occasional thunder of arms caches destroyed by American forces could be heard, the group viewed the homes in jaw-clenched silence.
The house most closely linked to al-Zarqawi, which contained the Tawhid and Jihad banner, is the last in a jumble of four homes in a neighborhood where Fallujah melts into the desert.
Three empty bottles of whiskey were dropped beside the front walk, and a pair of the type of black gym shoes worn by many insurgents was strewn in the doorway beside a black ski mask.
Inside, a black banner bearing Arabic writing was taken off a wall in an empty room. Translated, it read: "There is no God but God" and "The Organization of Tawhid and Jihad."