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Wolfowitz Hotel Assault
Naseer Al-Nahr, Asharq Al-Awsat
Arab News
BAGHDAD, 27 October 2003 — Anti-American forces struck at the heart of the US occupation yesterday, battering the Rashid Hotel with a rocket barrage that killed one US soldier, wounded 15 other people and sent scores of American officials fleeing their beds for safety, including the visiting deputy defense secretary. The dead American was a colonel.
The shaken-looking but unhurt Pentagon deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, said afterward the attack “will not deter us from completing our mission” in Iraq.
But the bold strike from nearly point-blank range once again pointed up the vulnerability of even heavily guarded US facilities in Iraq, where American forces sustain an average of 26 lower-profile attacks daily, and where Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz had come to assess ways to defeat a stubborn six-month-old insurgency.
A day earlier, attackers firing rocket-propelled grenades had forced down a US Army helicopter north of Baghdad just hours after Wolfowitz left that area on the second day of a three-day visit. One soldier was injured.
The modern, 462-room Rashid Hotel houses officials of the US-led occupation office — the Coalition Provisional Authority — and US military personnel.
The 6:10 a.m. attack, awakening people across central Baghdad, left the concrete western face of the 18-story building pockmarked with half a dozen or more blast holes. Windows were shattered in at least two dozen rooms. Torn drapes dangled out over sills. The US command said the 15 wounded included seven American civilians and four US military personnel. The command did not immediately identify the dead American, but in a transcript of remarks to a limited audience, Wolfowitz referred to the victims of the attack, “including a colonel who tragically died.”
A coalition official said, on condition of anonymity, that nationals from Czech Republic, Italy, Britain, Nepal and India were injured in the attack.
The transcript was released by the Pentagon but the colonel’s name was not published. Iraqi police said the attacker or attackers, in a white Chevrolet pickup, had boldly driven to the edge of the city’s main Zawra Park and Zoo, just a half-kilometer southwest of the hotel, towing what looked like a portable, two-wheeled generator or compressor.
A police commander, who spoke on condition he not be named, said that when security guards approached, the assailants drove off, but rockets within the blue trailer apparently had been set to fire via a timer and suddenly ignited, flashing toward the hotel, a clear shot looming just over the treetops. “When he saw us, he fled,” guard Jabbar Tarek said of the driver. The guards weren’t armed, Tarek said, or “I would have fired on him.” Tarek and two other guards were lightly injured by the ignition blast, police said.
Closer to the Rashid Hotel, Iraqi security guard Dafer Jawad, 28, saw projectiles flying toward the hotel. “There was a whooshing sound,” he said. The blasts shook houses and rattled windows a mile away.
“I thought my house was being destroyed, it was such a huge sound,” said Hamoudi Mutlag, 48, a Rashid maintenance worker who resides between the firing point and the hotel.
The damage was concentrated between the second and eighth floors in the northwest quarter of the hotel. “After a while, people were rushing across from the hotel into the convention center, some of them in pajamas or shorts,” said guard Jawad.
“There is no guarantee we can protect against this kind of thing unless we have soldiers on every block,” said Lt. Brian Dowd of Nanuet, New York, a 1st Armored Division reconnaissance officer at the scene.
At least two explosions detonated yesterday evening in an area of Baghdad that includes the headquarters of Iraq’s US-led administration, the US military said. A military spokesman said the explosions had gone off in the capital’s Green Zone.
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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