Bloodshed hits US allies hard

2003-12-01 07:26

Baghdad - An orgy of violence hit the US-led coalition in Iraq over the weekend, taking the lives of seven Spanish agents, two Japanese diplomats, a Colombian and two Koreans as well as two American soldiers, in what US commanders acknowledged was a deliberate attempt to intimidate their allies.

The seven Spanish agents were killed on their way from the capital to the town of Hilla, the coalition's headquarters for south-central Iraq, where Spain's 1 300 troops are deployed, the US military said.

Their bodies were flown home from Baghdad on Sunday via Kuwait along with a wounded officer from Madrid's national intelligence service, CNI, a Kuwait City airport source said.

A correspondent of London-based television Sky News, who was on the scene of the attack before coalition troops, said he saw a small crowd of Iraqis gathered around the bodies, chanting praise for Iraq's fugitive former strongman Saddam Hussein.

David Bowden said that as he drove back to Baghdad, he came across a body in the middle of the road.

"We looked around and there were three other (bodies) on the other side of the road," he said, adding that there were also two burned out cars.

In a further blow to US efforts to bolster foreign support for its operations in Iraq, two Japanese diplomats and their Iraqi driver were killed on their way to an aid meeting in Tikrit.

The attack, the first against Japanese personnel here, came as the two diplomats stopped at a food stall just 15km short of the restive town, which is now a major US base.

Wave of mourning

Their bodies were flown from Tikrit to the embassy in Baghdad on Sunday as Japan's first Iraq war losses sparked a wave of mourning at home.

In a fresh attack near Tikrit on Sunday, two South Koreans were killed and two seriously wounded in an attack on a highway near the northern Iraqi town, the South Korean foreign ministry said.

Both injured men were employees of a South Korean electric company, said a ministry statement carried by South Korea's official Yonhap news agency.

And US officials revealed that on Saturday a Colombian contractor was killed near the town of Balad to the southeast.

In a further attack on Saturday, in the far west of Iraq near the Syrian border, two US soldiers were killed and "several wounded" when their convoy came under rocket-propelled and small arms fire on the main highway through the Euphrates valley, the coalition's deputy director of operations, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt told a Baghdad news conference on Sunday.

The soldiers from the 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment were ambushed east of the troubled border town of Husaybah. One of the attackers was killed and nine captured, Kimmitt said.

The latest casualties made November the deadliest month for the coalition since the six-week spring invasion, with 94 military dead and another eight civilians.

- AFP