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Americans retreat and scatter
27/10/2003 08:14 - (SA)
Baghdad, Iraq - The United States occupation authority retreated from its headquarters in the Al Rasheed Hotel after Iraqis attacked the heavily guarded building with a missile barrage that killed an American colonel, wounded 18 people and sent the visiting US deputy defence secretary scurrying for safety.
Pentagon deputy Paul Wolfowitz, shaken-looking but unhurt, said the strike, from nearly point-blank range, "will not deter us from completing our mission" in Iraq.
But the bold blow at the heart of the US presence here clearly rattled US 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 TV.
The assault was likely planned over at least the past two months, a top US commander said, as the insurgents put together the improvised rocket launcher and figured out how to wheel it into the park just across the street from the hotel.
The effect of the volley of rockets at 06:10 was dramatic: US officials and officers fled from the Al Rasheed, some still in pajamas, to a nearby convention centre. The concrete western face of the 18-storey building was pockmarked with blast holes, and windows shattered in at least two dozen rooms.
Symbol of occupation
The modern, 462-room Al-Rasheed, housing civilian officials of the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority and US military personnel, is a symbol of the occupation. The assault highlighted the vulnerability of even heavily guarded US facilities in Iraq, where American forces sustain an average of 26 lower-profile attacks daily. Wolfowitz came to assess ways to defeat the stubborn six-month-old insurgency.
A coalition official said that the authority later ordered the hotel evacuated indefinitely, its hundreds of guests to be scattered among other lodging places in the so-called "Green Zone," a heavily guarded district along the Tigris River that includes the palace headquarters of the authority, the offices of the interim Iraqi Governing Council, and the Convention Centre housing coalition press relations and other offices.
More than 15 hours after the rocket fire, two explosions went off in the same area. An Iraqi police officer said an assailant fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a US convoy next to the al-Mansour Hotel, about 1,5km away from the Al Rasheed. There were no casualties, he said.
Black Hawk down
A day earlier, a rocket-propelled grenade forced down a US Army Black Hawk helicopter north of Baghdad, just hours after Wolfowitz left that area on the second day of his three-day visit. One soldier was injured.
The US command said the wounded included seven American civilians, four US military personnel, and seven non-US civilians working for the coalition. Two Iraqi security guards also were hurt. Wolfowitz said the dead American was a US colonel.
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