US 'scaling down' in Iraq
2003-12-29 06:41
Baghdad - A bomb blast killed a US soldier and two Iraqi children in Baghdad on Sunday, a day after a rebel assault left 12 Iraqis and seven coalition soldiers dead and scores wounded in Karbala.
A top Kurdish security official was also wounded in an ambush that killed three bodyguards in a continuing upsurge in violence, coinciding with reports that the United States has scaled down ambitious plans to build a new Iraq.
Two Iraqi children were killed, along with a US soldier, in the bomb blast in the capital on Sunday morning, a US military spokesperson said.
Five soldiers, one Iraqi interpreter and eight Iraqi Civil Defence Corps members were also wounded.
In the main Kurdish city of Arbil in northern Iraq, police said the deputy security chief of the formerly rebel Kurdistan Democratic Party was wounded and his three bodyguards killed when assailants opened fire with automatic weapons outside his home.
The KDP official, Jawamir Attiyah Kaki, was rushed to hospital, said Arbil's police chief Nariman Abdel Hamid.
On Christmas Eve, a suicide car bomber killed four people, as well as himself, and wounded 101 people outside Arbil's interior ministry.
The death toll from a series of suicide bomb attacks in Karbala meanwhile continued to mount, with a Bulgarian soldier and five Iraqis, including a woman, succumbing to wounds sustained in Saturday's assault on US allies.
An Iraqi hospital official put the number of Iraqis wounded in the attacks at 160, on top of the 24 coalition soldiers wounded.
Sunday's deaths raised to 12 the total number of Iraqis killed in the multiple attacks, which also claimed the lives of seven coalition soldiers - five Bulgarians and two Thais.
Bloody strike
It was the bloodiest strike on the Polish-led multinational division since its soldiers arrived in the south-central provinces of Karbala, Najaf, Wasit, Qadisiyah and Babil in September.
They were Bulgaria's first losses in Iraq, but President Georgi Parvanov vowed that Sofia would continue to support the US-led campaign in the country.
The Washington Post reported on Sunday that attacks on the US-led occupation, in addition to an accelerated timetable for Iraq's return to sovereignty, have prompted the United States to scale down its ambitious agenda to rebuild the country.
The daily said US officials had in the past few months dropped plans to privatise state-owned businesses and backed off efforts to disarm militias under the control of ethnic and political factions.
US administrator Paul Bremer and his deputies are now focused on forging compromises with Iraqi leaders and combating a persistent insurgency in order to meet a July 1 deadline to transfer sovereignty to a provisional government, the Post said.
"There's no question that many of the big-picture items have been pushed down the list or erased completely," the daily quoted a senior US official involved in Iraq's reconstruction as saying on condition of anonymity.