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Anti-US tensions boil over
01/05/2003 15:59 - (SA)
Fallujah, Iraq - Seven US soldiers were injured as anti-US tensions in Iraq boiled over into violence again on Thursday, while President George W Bush prepared to declare an end to the main phase of the Iraq war.
The soldiers were injured in a grenade attack in Fallujah, an Islamist conservative stronghold where 16 people were shot dead by US troops this week after protests over Washington's military occupation of Iraq.
The renewed bloodshed came as the White House announced that Bush would declare an end to "major combat operations" on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, returning home from the Gulf but still several hundred kilometres (miles) off the US Atlantic coast.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell also arrived in Spain - a major US ally in the Iraq war - for his first stop on a tour aimed at using the end of Saddam's regime to drive home Washington's agenda in the Middle East.
With the Iraq war now effectively over, Britain announced that it would be re-establishing a diplomatic mission in Iraq for the first time in 12 years from this weekend.
But the Fallujah attack on US troops, which occurred when two unidentified men lobbed grenades over the wall of their positions, starkly highlighted the continued lack of security prevailing in Iraq as the coalition forces battle to restore order.
US Central Command said five of seven troops wounded in the attack were evacuated for medical care but all were in a stable condition.
Fallujah, a city of 600 000 people some 50 kilometres west of Baghdad, has been the scene of some of the bloodiest clashes between Iraqis and US forces since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime on April 9.
Three Iraqis were killed and two left in critical condition in the city on Wednesday when US troops opened fire on an angry crowd of residents protesting the US presence, after 13 people were shot dead in a similar incident Monday night.
The population, largely under the rule of Sunni Muslim hardliners still loyal to Saddam, warned of more violence if US troops do not at least pull out to the edge of the city.
'Relatives will take revenge'
"The Americans must satisfy the families of the murdered people. Their relatives will start taking revenge on them with guns and bombs," said Fahri Urzurqi, a retired civil servant.
Khozhair Hamed Khozhair, a customer at a restaurant on the street where the shootings took place, said: "There will be no peace in this city as long as the Americans are here. We will decide what to do if they don't leave and we will do it."
As anti-US anger swirled in Fallujah, Bush was expected to say in a televised speech scheduled for 01:00 GMT on Friday that the key war goals had been achieved, but to nevertheless hold back from declaring a formal end to the conflict.
"This is not, from a legal point of view, the end of hostilities. Clearly, we continue to have forces that continue to be shot at, and return fire," White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer acknowledged.
The new British mission in Baghdad will be headed by Christopher Segar, who was deputy head of mission at the British embassy in Baghdad before it was evacuated in January 1991, shortly before the Gulf war.
Segar and three of his staff will stay in modular units on a cricket pitch in the grounds of the old embassy until the building is deemed structurally safe to move in to.
Efforts continued to fill the power vacuum left by Saddam's fall, with Iraqi leaders holding talks on how to form an interim government for the country, which is currently run by US civil administrator, retired general Jay Garner.
Massoud Barzani, head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) said leaders of five former opposition groups discussed how to set up the interim government within a month, following a US-hosted meeting with 250 leading Iraqis on Monday.
Meanwhile tens of thousands of Iraq's Shiite Muslims, who form a clear majority in the country, took in part mass processions in the holy city of Najaf in a fresh reminder of the group's potential clout in postwar Iraq.
Steered clear of politics
However religious leaders at the ritual, which marked the anniversary of the Prophet Mohammad's death in 632 AD, steered clear of politics, while an expected address from Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani did not materialise.
A few hundred joyous Iraqi communists freely celebrated May Day in Baghdad for the first time in decades, expressing hopes their recently revived party would grow in support.
Aside from restoring security and government in the embattled country, London and Washington also face the task of hunting down the former regime's alleged arsenal of banned arms - their main justification for launching the war on March 20.
US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage warned that it could take several months to find evidence of Iraq's banned weapons programs because they were "even more dispersed and disguised than we thought."
His comments were echoed by British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who said "a systematic campaign of concealment" by Saddam meant that assembling an accurate picture of Iraq's weapons programmes would take time.
A group of former intelligence specialists called on Bush to invite UN weapons inspectors back to Iraq, an idea fiercely resisted by Washington, which has sent its own arms experts to the country.
Powell's arrival in the Spanish capital Madrid, where he is later due to meet Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, comes ahead of planned visits to both Syria and Lebanon, from whom Washington wants to see major changes in regional policy in the aftermath of the Iraq war.
Syria, one of the countries on the US blacklist of "rogue" states, was accused by the United States in April of jeopardising coalition forces in Iraq and of allegedly harbouring of fugitive members of Saddam's elite.
Powell's tour follows Donald Rumsfeld's visit to the Gulf region this week, which saw the US defence secretary become the most senior US official to visit Baghdad since the ousting of Saddam's regime.
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