F.Y.I
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20030720/wl_nm/iraq_dc&cid=574&ncid=1480
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2 hours, 13 minutes ago |
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By Alastair Macdonald
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Two U.S. soldiers were killed in northern Iraq (news - web sites) on Sunday and an Iraqi U.N. driver died after a United Nations (news - web sites) convoy came under fire for the first time.
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The killing of four of its soldiers within 48 hours added to domestic pressure on the United States to persuade reluctant allies who opposed its invasion to share the burden in Iraq.
The attack on the aid workers highlighted the lawlessness in Iraq since U.S.-led forces toppled Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) in April.
A foreign employee of the U.N.-affiliated International Organization for Migration (IOM) was slightly injured and the driver killed when their vehicle veered into a bus after being raked by gunfire from a passing car south of the capital.
"We do not intend to allow it to curtail our humanitarian activities," U.N. spokesman Ahmad Fawzi told Reuters in Baghdad, calling the shooting near Hilla an isolated incident.
Attacks on U.S. soldiers, however, are anything but.
A U.S. military spokesman said two soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division were killed and a third wounded in an ambush by gunmen firing rocket-propelled grenades west of Mosul.
The four deaths since Friday brought to 37 the number of troops killed by the enemy since President Bush (news - web sites) declared an end to major combat operations on May 1.
Sunday's ambush near Tall Afur was in Sunni tribal lands but well beyond the pro-Saddam "Sunni Triangle" north and west of Baghdad where attacks have been concentrated -- a reminder that the occupiers' problems are not confined to that area.
ANGRY SHI'ITES
To the south of Baghdad in Najaf, a city holy to the long-oppressed Shi'ite Muslim majority, more than 10,000 angry, anti-American Shi'ite demonstrators reluctantly dispersed only after U.S. Marines stood their ground with fixed bayonets.
U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, on a visit to Iraq, said at Saddam's infamous Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad that Iraqis who committed atrocities during Saddam's brutal rule were backing the guerrilla campaign against U.S. forces.
"There are thousands of people who are implicated in those crimes, and are now working to try to kill Americans so they can bring back the old order, but it's not going to happen," he said. "We have most Iraqi people on our side."
He said many Iraqis still lived in fear of Saddam, who is believed to be still at large somewhere in Iraq.
Paul Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq said on Sunday he believed Saddam was still in the country, probably hiding in the area where most of the attacks on Americans are being organized.
U.S. Central Command chief General John Abizaid, also on a visit to Iraq, said thousands of Iraqi recruits to a new army could be armed to join the struggle against anti-American guerrillas. But U.S. troop numbers would remain at around 148,000 for at least three months, he told the Washington Post.
Big military powers like France and India have pressed for clear U.N. authority before they will commit troops to help. Controversy over the way the United States and Britain launched the invasion in the face of opposition from U.N. allies has not made the task of building a broader coalition any easier.
Touring Asia, British Prime Minister Tony Blair (news - web sites) faced a crisis at home over the suicide of a government scientist and former weapons inspector who was embroiled in a row over whether ministers had exaggerated the threat from Iraqi chemical, nuclear and biological weapons to justify the war.
PRE-WAR BOMBING
Blair has denied British troops were sent to war to suit a timetable decided by U.S. military planners well in advance of U.N. decisions. A report that U.S. bombing of Iraq as far back as mid-2002 was specifically intended to weaken Saddam's defenses for an attack may prompt more questions in London.
The New York Times cited what it said was a paper by the U.S. air war commander saying long-standing U.S. and British air patrols had provided a cover for pre-invasion strikes.
Criticism of the war's cost to ordinary Iraqis could also be fueled by the Times report that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved every one of more than 50 air strikes for which commanders needed his specific clearance because they thought it likely that they would kill more than 30 civilians.
Those angered by postwar U.S. policy in Iraq may also find ammunition in comments by Amnesty International. Officials from the human rights watchdog visiting Baghdad told Reuters they had heard of "very severe" abuses and "appalling" conditions for detainees in U.S. jails, to which they were denied access.
Stung by criticism, U.S. officials are pinning their hopes on a Governing Council, appointed a week ago, to help restore services and security and so defuse mounting anger over a failure to deliver on promises of democracy and a better life.
To satisfy competing claims from Shi'ite and Sunni Arabs, Kurds and others, the 25-member council may have a rotating presidency, one party spokesman told Reuters. (Additional reporting by Andrew Marshall, Huda Majeed Saleh, Michael Georgy and Cynthia Johnson in Baghdad and Miral Fahmy in Najaf)
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