Fears of guerrilla war in Iraq rise with more attacks

News, June 2003, Al-Jazeerah.info

Compiled by Daily Star staff, 6/28/03

US forces were searching Friday for two soldiers believed abducted along with their vehicle in Iraq as attacks against coalition troops continued, killing an American soldier and wounding another.
The latest ambush in what has become a daily routine of painful blows to occupation troops reinforces fears the United States is confronting guerrilla warfare.
In response to the unrest, the leader of a key Iraqi Shiite movement said he opposed violence against the governing coalition.
“The use of violence is the last resort,” Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq said during his Friday sermon in Najaf.
“We must start by negotiations and peaceful demonstrations against the occupation,” he added.
SCIRI is the main Shiite group to have opposed the Baathist regime and is part of a council of former opposition
parties that has been in talks with the coalition about post-war Iraq’s future administration.
Separately, a group of US policy experts left Washington on Friday to carry out a review of post-war Iraq amid growing fears over the toll on US forces.
The five-member group, led by John Hamre, a former deputy defense secretary in President Bill Clinton’s administration and now president of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, will report to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the chief US administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, said a Pentagon spokesman.
The decision to turn to outside experts for advice comes amid growing concern over the organized armed resistance against the US-led occupation force and delays in the process leading to Iraqi self-rule.
US and British forces are suffering almost daily fatalities.
The US military said it detained six Iraqis on Friday in connection with the disappearance of two servicemen earlier this week north of Baghdad.
A soldier was shot in the face while buying digital video compact discs in Baghdad early Friday, according to witnesses. Pentagon officials did not give details on his condition.
The soldier was shot as he approached a street vendor on the main street near the Imam al-Kazim Mosque in the Al-Kazimiyah neighborhood in northwest Baghdad just before noon.
Another soldier was killed in a shooting near the town of Kufah south of Baghdad late Thursday, bringing to 19 the number of US troops killed in combat since May 1 when US President George W. Bush declared the war effectively over.
US Central Command (Centcom) said the soldier, attached to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, was killed in an ambush while investigating a car theft near Kufah, close to the Shiite holy city of Najaf.
Medical evacuation was immediately called but the soldier died before it could arrive, Centcom said in a statement.
Iraqi police Lieutenant Anjed Abdel-Amin from the Kufah police station said the US soldier was one of seven on a joint patrol with four Iraqis and was shot in the throat during a clash with bandits in Abbassiya.
A separate overnight attack in Fallujah the second in three days saw attackers fire a rocket-propelled grenade at a US position, residents said, although US military officials provided no confirmation.
There were no reports of US casualties in the attack in the restive town, some 50 kilometers west of Baghdad.
Just northwest of Baghdad on Friday morning, a US Army truck struck an explosive device on a dirt road. A US soldier and a witness said wounded Americans were evacuated by helicopter.
The US soldier said on condition of anonymity that the Americans were driving to Baghdad to make telephone calls to their families when the explosion occurred.
Meanwhile, authorities interrogated six suspects detained in connection with the disappearance of two American soldiers, said Sergeant Patrick Compton, a US military spokesman in Baghdad.
US forces kept up ground and aerial searches that have so far failed to find the soldiers or their Humvee, Compton said.
The pair were guarding the perimeter of a rocket demolition site near the town of Balad, 25 miles north of Baghdad, when they failed to answer a radio call and were reported missing Wednesday night, Compton said.
“We don’t know if they were abducted or they were just killed,” Compton said.
Also Friday, British forces in the southern city of Basra, responding to a tip from local residents, discovered and removed a surface-to-air missile launcher at a hospital another likely indication that Saddam Hussein used humanitarian sites as shields for military hardware.
The missile system had been hidden on the grounds of the Shatt al-Arab Hospital and British soldiers said it had been fired on a number of occasions from the facility during the war.
“Having spoken to the locals, they’re claiming that this system was used twice from this hospital location,” said Major David White of the British Army. “It would have been very difficult for coalition forces to do a precision strike without possibly endangering locals in the area.”
Officials played down the violence, but the surge in attacks is causing concern that the US-led occupation of Iraq could be turning into a guerrilla war. Agencies

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

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