Posted on 10/27/2003 10:56:22 AM PST by anotherview
Oct. 27, 2003
US points oblique finger at Syria as Baghdad death toll reaches 40
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
BAGHDAD, Iraq
U.S. soldiers at Baghdad police station after it was hit by a car bomb.
The car bombers who struck the international Red Cross headquarters and three police stations across Baghdad on Monday killed about 40 and injuring more than 200 in a spree of destruction on the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
The string of bombings, all within less than an hour, was the bloodiest attack yet in the city of 5 million by insurgents targeting the American-led occupation and those perceived as working with it. It also appeared like a dramatic escalation in tactics - in past weeks, bombers have carried out heavy suicide bombings, but in single strikes.
The U.S. military said one American soldier was killed and six U.S. troops were wounded in the bombing at the al Baya'a police station in the city's ad-Doura district. Iraqi police Brig. Gen. Ahmed Ibrahim, the deputy interior minister, put the Iraqi death toll at 34, including 26 civilians and eight police.
Car bombs also exploded at the al-Shaab and al-Khadra police stations.
The Red Cross said 12 of the dead Iraqis were killed at its office, including two of its own employees.
The bombings came hours after clashes in the Baghdad area killed three U.S. soldiers overnight, and a day after insurgents hit a hotel full of U.S. occupation officials with a barrage of rockets, killing a U.S. colonel and wounding 18 other people. U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was in the hotel, but was unhurt.
"We feel helpless when see this," a distraught Iraqi doctor said at the devastated Red Cross offices.
A top Iraqi security official blamed foreign fighters for the assault.
"Iraq is safeguarding freedom and no one will take that away from us...Some countries, unfortunately, are trying to send people to do attacks," Brig.Gen. Ahmed Ibrahim, deputy Interior Minister, told reporters, without naming which nations.
At a fourth police station in the "New Baghdad" district, officers stopped a suicide bomber before he could detonate his Land Cruiser. "He was shouting, `Death to the Iraqi police! You're collaborators!"' said police Sgt. Ahmed Abdel Sattar.
In Fallujah, 65 kilometers (40 miles) west of Baghdad, witnesses said U.S. troops opened fire, killing at least four Iraqi civilians, after a roadside bomb exploded as a U.S. military convoy passed. The U.S. command did not immediately confirm the incident or any U.S. casualties.
At the offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross in central Baghdad, witnesses said a suicide bomber drove an explosives-packed vehicle, apparently an ambulance, right up to security barriers outside the building at about 8:30 a.m. and detonated it, blowing down the Red Cross's front wall, devastating the interior and blowing shrapnel and debris over a wide area.
Baghdad ICRC spokeswoman Nada Doumani said she believed the employees were security guards.
Then, through the morning, four other vehicles exploded at police stations in the Baghdad area. Ambulances, sirens wailing, crisscrossed the city all morning.
"From what our indications are, none of those bombers got close to the target," U.S. Brig. Gen. Mark Hertling said. But the explosions outside police stations left streetscapes of broken, bloody bodies and twisted, burning automobiles.
Hertling said he believed the attacks may have been timed with the start of Ramadan in order to heighten tensions during the fasting month, when Muslims abstain from food and drink during daylight hours and religious feelings run high.
Near the three-story ICRC building, cigarette vendor Ghani Khadim, 50, said he saw an Iraqi ambulance pass by his stand and approach the small compound some 100 meters (yards) away. It suddenly exploded, he said, and the blast blew out windows and injured his wife and daughter in his house behind his stand.
The vehicle had stopped some 60 feet in front of the Red Cross headquarters, "at a line of barrels we have had in front to protect the building," one Red Cross employee, who would not give his name.
The blast blew down a 40-foot section of the ICRC front wall, demolished a dozen cars in the area and apparently broke a water main, flooding the streets. The inside of the building was heavily damaged, littered with shattered glass, doors blown off their hinges, toppled bookcases and collapsed ceilings. A gaping crack had opened in a back wall, some 100 yards from the blast site, where a crater some five yards across quickly filled with water.
The Red Cross staff member said someone began firing off an automatic weapon immediately after the explosion - "100 bullets or more." He said he believed it was a gunmen somehow associated with the bomber "who wanted to scare people more."
Red Cross spokeswoman Nada Doumani said more than 100 workers would normally be at ICRC after 9 a.m., but staffers said only about one-quarter that number were present at 8:30 a.m.
"Of course we don't understand why somebody would attack the Red Cross," she said. "The Red Cross has operated in this country since 1980, and we have not been involved in politics."
In Geneva, Red Cross spokesman Florian Westphal said the ICRC had disclosed in August that it had received warnings of a threat and added that it had been cutting back on its staff since a Sri Lankan staffer was killed July 22 south of Baghdad.
"Such an attack is a major blow for us," Westphal said. "It's a big shock. It is obviously impossible to move onto a normal day's business, so we really have to step back and take stock."
Two buildings away, the explosion devastated the interior of the Al-Nawal private polyclinic operated by Dr. Jamal F. Massa, 53, who had been planning to open it as a full-fledged hospital next month.
"We feel helpless when we see this," he said. He said he couldn't understand why the Red Cross would be attacked, since it had even reduced its foreign staff recently. "This only hurts guards and other Iraqis."
The Red Cross and other international aid organizations had reduced their Baghdad staffs after the car bombing of U.N. headquarters in Baghdad on Aug. 19, in which 23 people died in what appeared to be a warning against international support for the U.S. occupation.
The U.S. general Hertling said Monday was "a great day for the Iraqi police" because security controls prevented the bombers from reaching their targets.
An attack on a fifth police station was foiled when the attacker was shot and wounded. American and Iraqi officials said he was carrying Syrian identification and had identified himself as Syrian.
But Mouwafak al-Rabii, a Shiite Muslim member of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, said the United States must speed up the training of Iraqi police and soldiers and employ ruthless measures to crush the insurgency.
"There is no doubt about it that we need to change the rules of engagement with these people," al-Rabii told CNN. "The rules of engagement now are too lenient."
The rocket attack Sunday struck the Al-Rasheed Hotel, where Wolfowitz was staying at the end of a three-day Iraq visit. The deputy defense secretary said afterward that attack "will not deter us from completing our mission" in Iraq.
But the bold blow at the heart of the U.S. presence here clearly rattled U.S. confidence that it is defeating Iraq's shadowy insurgents.
"We'll have to get the security situation under control," Secretary of State Colin Powell told NBC's "Meet the Press."
The concrete western face of the 18-story hotel, located more than two miles west of the international Red Cross building, was pockmarked with a half-dozen or more blast holes. Windows shattered in at least two dozen rooms. The U.S. command said the wounded included seven American civilians, four U.S. military personnel and five non-U.S. civilians working for the coalition.
Two Iraqi security guards also were hurt. The command did not immediately identify the dead American, but Wolfowitz said he was a U.S. colonel.
We need to deal with Syria and Iran sooner, not later.
Brig. Gen. Mark Hertling of the U.S. Army's 1st Armored Division said police shot and wounded the man when he got out of a car and tried to hurl a grenade at a Baghdad police station. The car carried three mortar rounds and was packed with TNT, he said.
"He's a foreign fighter. He had a Syrian passport and the policemen claim that as he was shot and fell that he said he was Syrian," Hertling told a news conference.
Iraqi Deputy Interior Minister Ahmad Ibrahim told the news conference the wounded attacker was now unconscious in hospital.
Hertling said suicide attacks were not typical of supporters of ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, who have been blamed by the U.S. military for most of guerrilla attacks on its troops and other targets in postwar Iraq.
"There are indicators that certainly these attacks have a mode of operation of foreign fighters," Hertling said, adding that possible foreign links among the attackers would be investigated in the days to come.
Thirty-four people were killed, including eight police officers, in the suicide attacks on three other police stations and the Red Cross headquarters, Ibrahim said. Another 224 people were wounded, 65 of them police. One of the bombers, driving an Iraqi police car and wearing a police uniform, was admitted to a police compound before blowing himself and the station up, Hertling said.
He described the attacks as coordinated but said the coordination was not very sophisticated, extending no further than a decision by the various attackers to set off their bombs between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m.
"That's not professional, it's actually somewhat amateurish," Hertling said.
There was no indication that Monday's bombings were related to a Sunday rocket attack on a fortified Baghdad hotel where U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz was staying, Hertling said. A U.S. soldier was killed and 17 people were wounded in that attack, but Wolfowitz was unhurt.
source
It typical politics, of course they want you to train their police and soldiers quickly, then they will tell you get the hell out.
The US has put these people in as "yes men", but they can see how much money they can make once the Americans are out of the way. Chalabi is a criminal in more than one country (Jordan and Switzerland) and maybe other places he was not caught. They are not representative of a respectable Iraqi's or Muslim's of this world.
It is easy for Washington to put trust in these people, its not their lives they are playing with, its the young soldiers on the front line, who have to have eyes in the back of their head.
And before I get all the harsh responces on Muslims, millions of them go to Mecca every year for the Hajj, from all parts of the world rich and poor in respect of their faith. So if we are going to judge, then please judge the guilty only.
Actually, no. It's against their religion to fight against other Muslims, but when Muslims get killed while they are fighting against Christians, Jews, and assorted Others, that's just collateral damage, and they'll go straight to Paradise. No virgins, but still...
It appears the US does not have too much sucess with borders and letting terorists/criminals/illegals in or out case in point (Canada and Mexico).
So it needs to learn fast, Freepers could see what was about to happen a long time ago. And now these people are established, weapons staches and safe houses etc. There is going to be hell to pay.
And the CIA just reported the militias that are there are not going to run out of weapons any time soon.
So we are not talking about a syrian running over the border like in Mexico, we are talking arms shipments.
So where the hell is the sophisticated Technology when you need it.
Suggestion: instead of "Bomber" Harris-style carpet bombing (the kind that creates lots of dead kiddies and other civilians for Al-Jazeera to videotape), why don't we just bomb military airfields, barracks, intelligence HQ and tank and artillery concentrations. In other words, the symbols of Assad's power.
No, no, no (smiling). First, Iraq must recall its Syrian ambassador.
Then it must expell the entire Syrian embassy.
The pucker factor begins to kick in at that point, and no doubt Iraq will soon be getting Syrian help in stemming this minor problem after those actions are taken.
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