Hundreds protest against violence in Baghdad
A US soldier has been killed in a mortar attack on a base in northern Iraq as hundreds of Iraqis marched through the centre of Baghdad to protest against the violence plaguing the country's reconstruction.
After US President George W Bush told his troops during a lightning Thanksgiving visit to Baghdad that the coalition would prevail over insurgents, former US first lady Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton spent the day in the city.
In Europe, police also moved against the Iraqi insurgency, arresting three alleged militants suspected of recruiting insurgents for suicide attacks in the country.
Iraqi police and US forces closed off Baghdad's main commercial thoroughfare as hundreds marched through the city centre to demonstrate against terror amid persistent fears of attack by anti-US insurgents or Islamic militants.
Security services were taking no chances with a rally bound to be seen as pro-American by the insurgents and a heavy Iraqi police presence accompanied the marchers while two US military helicopters hovered ahead.
"This is the picture of the martyr Adnan - he is a martyr of terror," Hassan Rehemi said, holding aloft a photograph of his 20-year-old son, who died in a blast north of Baghdad last week.
In a speech, Aziz al-Yasser, the coordinator of the rally organisers, the Alliance of Iraqi Democratic Forces, called on ordinary people to help the US-led coalition in the fight against insurgents.
"We have to help the coalition - the call issued by some for the withdrawal of occupation forces is suspect, Iraq will drown in a lake of blood if they withdraw," he said, adding that the attacks were delaying the end of the US-led occupation.
The latest coalition casualty came when a US soldier from the 101st Airborne Division was killed when four mortar shells were fired at the division's base in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, a US army spokesman said.
Meanwhile, Italian and German police arrested three North Africans as part of a massive anti-terror dragnet reportedly connected with terrorist attacks in Iraq.
The arrests followed a confirmation by prosecutors in Milan that they had issued arrest warrants for five suspected Al Qaeda activists, including an Algerian arrested in Germany and a woman nabbed at dawn in Padua.
They were wanted, among other things, on suspicion of having recruited suicide attackers for strikes in Iraq, police sources said.
The five included the Algerian whom German police said had been arrested in Hamburg at the request of the Italian prosecutors.
A police spokeswoman identified him as Mahjub Abderrazak, known as "the sheikh".
Italian prosecutors say the Milan-based cell, which had contacts throughout northern Italy, was trying to recruit suicide bombers for attacks in Iraq.
But two of the five for whom warrants were issued were still at large, including an Iraqi and a Tunisian, both 33.
-- AFP