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"All day, you build up for the moment when you fire the shot," Field, 23, says as he and his partner take positions in a hostile zone. "Then there's a feeling of exhilaration, and you feel like you've really done something for your country. You've taken someone out."

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FALLUJAH, Iraq - Attackers lobbed two grenades into a U.S. Army compound Thursday, wounding seven soldiers just hours after the Americans had fired on Iraqi protesters in the street outside, a U.S. intelligence officer reported.

The incident — the latest in a series of clashes and deadly shootings involving U.S. troops in Fallujah — came as President Bush prepared to address to the American public from a homeward-bound aircraft carrier, declaring that major combat in Iraq is finished.

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For 15 years, the three al-Ani brothers have run a taxi business from their adjacent houses, opposite the local school. It was a nice place to live, recalls Raid al-Hati, their neighbour and cousin, a quiet part of town.
The brothers shared one vehicle. 'It was a living,' said Osama, now in hospital and rasping through the pain of gunshot injuries to his head and side.

The family has been torn to shreds after their homes were sprayed by American gunfire during an incident that represents a turning point in the invasion of Iraq, as hostility to the US military intensifies.

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I have an expectation that we will see rough behavior in this country for the foreseeable future. We will be up to it and our people will continue to do their jobs," Gen. Tommy Franks, who commanded the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, said in Washington of the attacks.

In the most brazen attack, an Iraqi walked up to a soldier on a bridge and opened fire with a pistol at close range, according to senior U.S. Army officers in Baghdad who had heard reports of the shooting.

The officers said the slain soldier, whom they did not identify, belonged to the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment from Fort Polk, La. Calls to that regiment's public affairs officer here went unanswered Thursday night.

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The lawlessness continues. Yesterday an American soldier was shot dead in broad daylight by an Iraqi who approached him with a pistol. US forces exchange fire with armed Iraqis almost daily across the country.

The continued failure to impose law and order on the streets of many towns and cities is drawing harsh criticism. "The last month has been pretty catastrophic in terms of building a new government," said Peter Galbraith, a former US ambassador who has spent the last three weeks in Iraq.

"The authority of the occupying power of the United States was very much diminished by this orgy of looting and destruction," he said.

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You might be interested in this:

It is de facto accepted that Karzai is essentially a glorified mayor of Kabul.

To bring Afghanistan up to even, say, Iranian standards, would probably cost upwards of $20 billion US. That's for installing water purification and recycling systems, paving some proper highways and roads, and building lots of housing to replace that lost to years of civil war.

And then there's Iraq. There was no attempt to guard anything but the oil.

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ASH SHATRA, Iraq -- A banner honoring an old man marks the day when Marines barreled through here, firing their weapons and leaving a trail of death.

"Ali Auwalid Aubaid: His spirit has gone to God by the hands of the enemy Americans," it reads.

The hand-scrawled poster near where the 80-year-old resident allegedly was hit by U.S. bullets has become a rallying point for thousands of poor Iraqi villagers.

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[ 11 May 2003: Message edited by: majorvictory ]

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BAGHDAD, May 11 -- Late Friday night, two young women arrived at the iron gates of the Alwia neighborhood's maternity hospital, where a dust-covered white statue of a nursing mother welcomes patients and visitors. The teenagers were bruised and bloody, hospital workers recall. They asked to see a female doctor.

An OB-GYN named Enas Hamdani examined them. The doctor's disgust and anger grew as the pair sobbed out their story. While they were walking last Wednesday afternoon to buy bread at the market, three men in an orange-and-white taxi kidnapped them at gunpoint. They were driven several miles, they said, to a small house on the periphery of the city, in a farming area they'd never been before.

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"They are going to start shooting a few looters so that word gets around," The Times quoted an official who attended the meeting with Bremer as saying. "I think you are going to see a change in the rules of engagement within a few days to get the situation under control."

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Statistics unpublished until today reveal the stark facts: 242 people have died in Baghdad in just over three weeks, almost all from bullet wounds. It is an epidemic, and it is getting worse.

But the late-night scenes in a city hospital tell the real story of the postwar price that the Iraqi capital is paying for the occupying forces' failure to live up to their responsibility to make the streets safe.

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BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 17 — It was another bad week for Karim W. Hassan, director general of Iraq's electricity commission.

Looters had already pilfered underground cables, carted off computers that regulate power distribution, stolen 25 of the guards' 30 patrol cars, emptied warehouses of spare parts, ransacked substations and shot up transmission lines across the country's electric grid.

Then, his men reported, armed bandits stole the only cable splicer in central Iraq, needed to repair countless vandalized electric lines.

[QUOTE]

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Iraqi children are tampering with dumped ammunition to help feed their hungry families. Their deaths come as no surprise to aid workers in Basra, says Dominic Nutt

When United Nations officials announced that nine Iraqi children were killed last week as they played with ammunition left over from the war, the UN spokeswoman prefaced her comments by saying it was actually "good news." So common are these incidents, it was suggested that "only nine" was an improvement on previous days.

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BAGHDAD – Evidence is mounting to suggest that between 5,000 and 10,000 Iraqi civilians may have died during the recent war, according to researchers involved in independent surveys of the country.

Though it is still too early for anything like a definitive estimate, the surveyors warn, preliminary reports from hospitals, morgues, mosques, and homes point to a level of civilian casualties far exceeding the Gulf War, when 3,500 civilians are thought to have died.

"Thousands are dead, thousands are missing, thousands are captured," says Haidar Taie, head of the tracing department for the Iraqi Red Crescent in Baghdad. "It is a big disaster."

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Major U.S. combat operations in Iraq ended weeks ago, but American soldiers are still fighting and dying there, reports CBS News’ John Roberts.

Two American soldiers were killed and four others wounded Monday in two separate incidents in one of the deadliest days for U.S. troops in postwar Iraq.

The commander of U.S. forces in Iraq says not a day goes by without intelligence warnings about threats against his troops. Attacks on American soldiers are increasing in both frequency and ferocity, and ambushes, are their biggest worry, reports CBS News Correspondent David Hawkins.

In Northern Iraq, a U.S. Army supply convoy was ambushed on Monday: one American was killed and another wounded.

In a separate ambush in Baghdad, the lead Humvee in a convoy hit a homemade land mine, killing one soldier and wounding three others.

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Go tell the Spartans.

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Pardon me if I'm wrong but that sounds like incitement or encouragement of violence and you want me to think you don't have ulterior motives.

If it's self defense how come nobody defied Saddam? even if the Americans did supported Saddam. Geez I guess we're all hypocrites and life is full of contradictions.

[ 27 May 2003: Message edited by: Justice ]

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Pardon me if I'm wrong but that sounds like incitement or encouragement of violence and you want me to think you don't have ulterior motives.

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"Ulterior motives?" What, that I'm hiding behind my computer terminal, sniping at Marines?

What the heck are you talking about?

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Central Command says the woman continued crawling toward the soldiers even after she was shot. The squad then fired again and killed her.

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The Iraqi Intifada already has a starting date: July 27. And guess who's the rebel with a cause in charge? None other than Saddam Hussein. He seems to be alive, well and in hiding.

This is the crux of an intelligence report received by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and confirmed by a number of sources in the Middle East to the website Free Arab Voice. According to sensitive, formerly secret information, Saddam's new leadership-in-hiding - where the number 2 is former defense minister Sultan Hashim Ahmad - is getting ready to launch what had been largely advertised before the Iraqi invasion, by once deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz and minister of information Mohammed al-Sahaf, among others: a guerrilla war supposed to bog down the US in a replay of Vietnam. For this undertaking, Saddam can count on an army of 40,000.

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Gunmen have killed two US soldiers and wounded nine others in a flashpoint Iraqi town.

US military officials said a "hostile force" based in a mosque fired rocket-propelled grenades and small arms at a US Army unit in Falluja, 50 kilometres (30 miles) north-west of the capital Baghdad.

US Central Command (Centcom) says its soldiers responded decisively, killing two of the attackers and capturing six others.

Tuesday morning's attack was the latest of several such incidents in recent days

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Four U.S. soldiers were killed in Iraq on Wednesday, May 28, when their helicopter was downed, as demonstrators in the capital slammed the American civil administrator’s decision to dissolve ministries of defense and information as well as the “provocative” acts of the occupation troops.

The four soldiers were killed when their helicopter was downed in the town of Hit, 90 miles northwest of Baghdad, Al-Jazeera television said.

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HIT, Iraq — In the third straight day of Iraqi violence against the U.S. military occupation of the country, residents enraged over house-to-house searches in this western town ransacked the police station, stoned U.S. armored military vehicles and set police cars on fire Wednesday.

With a large, uncontrolled mob still roaming the streets as dusk fell, it was impossible to determine exactly what triggered the riot, but in a series of chaotic interviews laced with anti-American rage and threats of vengeance, residents said the problems began when police assisted the U.S. troops in searching local homes for weapons.

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On Wednesday, American soldiers returned to the police station to talk with the local authorities about security. A crowd gathered and pelted the station with stones. Then someone threw a hand grenade over the wall of the police compound. Two soldiers suffered minor wounds, and reinforcements raced to the scene.

"The citizens didn't accept the behavior of the Americans," an elderly resident in a white robe said in unaccented English that he learned while a student at a technical institute in St. Louis in the 1960's.

The crowd grew. The soldiers formed a cordon with their guns aimed outward as they evacuated their wounded, witnesses said. Warning shots rang out. One local man said he had been shot through the leg. When the troops retreated, the crowded rioted for hours, burning the municipal building and the police station in protest at what was viewed as the "collaboration" of the police.

It was one of a series of attacks this week in which six American soldiers were killed and a dozen wounded, most in central Iraq.

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US soldiers opened fire on a festive wedding parade earlier this week, killing three teenagers and wounding seven others after the celebrants fired weapons in the air.

Three teens remained in a "very critical" condition on Wednesday, and four other young people were in a stable condition, said Dr Abdul al Rahman, who helped treat many of the victims at Samarra General Hospital, a 90-minute drive north of Baghdad.

In the hospital bed next to Jassim lay 12-year-old Mohammad Ahmed, with gunshot wounds to his abdomen, thighs and scrotum. "He's a child," Dr Rahman said.

Following the shooting, the doctor said, several US soldiers with rifles walked into the hospital, seeking the names of those who had been wounded. The sight of armed soldiers, so soon after the shooting, so frightened people in the hospital that some of them fled.

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A British soldier was being questioned yesterday over the discovery of pictures showing possible war crimes against Iraqi prisoners.

Fusilier Gary Bartlam, 18, was detained by civilian police after he took a roll of film to be developed at a store in his hometown of Tamworth, Staffordshire.

The Sun newspaper claimed the pictures showed Iraqi men being subjected to "terrifying and degrading" abuse at the hands of British troops. One is said to show a prisoner suspended by rope from a forklift truck being driven by a laughing British serviceman.

In others, Iraqi men are seen apparently being forced into sexual positions by their British captors.

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BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Thousands of sacked Iraqi soldiers threatened Monday to launch suicide attacks against U.S. troops as leaders of the country's squabbling tribes told the Americans they could face war if they did not leave soon.

"The entire Iraqi people is a time bomb that will blow up in the Americans' face if they don't end their occupation. We refuse to deal with the occupation," tribal leader Riyadh al- Asadi told Reuters after meeting a senior U.S. official for talks on the future of Iraq...

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I showed our identity passes and the officer, wearing a floppy camouflage hat, was polite but short. "You should have seen our checkpoint," he snapped, then added: "Have a good stay in Nasiriyah but don't go out after dark. It's not safe."

What he meant, I think, was that it wasn't safe for American soldiers after dark. Hours later, I went out in the streets of Nasiriyah for a chicken burger and the Iraqis who served me in a run-down cafe couldn't have been friendlier. There were the usual apologies for the dirt on the table and the lack of paper napkins, along with the usual grimy square on the wall where, just two months ago, a portrait of Saddam Hussein must have been hanging. So what was going on? The "liberators" were already entering the wilderness of occupation while our masters in London and Washington were still braying about victory and courage

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A U.S. soldier was wounded in a bomb attack in Baghdad even as New York's former top cop Bernard Kerik pronounced "a 100% change" for the better in the chaotic city.

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NYC Daily news - June 2

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June 3, 2003

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- A U.S. soldier was shot and killed while on patrol in central Iraq early Tuesday, the military said.

The shooting took place near the town of Balad, about 55 miles north of the capital, said Maj. William Thurmond, a spokesman for the U.S. Army's V Corps.

Thurmond said he had no further details and the soldier's name was being withheld pending notification of the family.

A statement released later by the U.S. military said the soldier was attached to the 4th Infantry Division, which controls Balad.

The attack included small arms and rocket-propelled grenades, the statement said.

There has been a series of hit-and-run attacks on U.S. troops across the central region of the country since the end of ground combat almost two months ago. At least six soldiers have been killed and more than two dozen wounded.

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On May 3, six men with handguns surrounded a house in Basra's al-Jenina quarter and stole the family's car by holding the owner's eight-year-old son at gunpoint. Walid Hamid Kadhim, thirty years old, is the car owner's brother-in-law:

We were inside the house after lunch, when the looters lured the children outside [the house] by offers of money. When my brother-in-law [Nasir `Abdul Hussein] went out to see what was going on, the looters held his son and put a handgun to his head. They said we want your pickup truck. Nasir tried to reason with them, but they quarreled and the looters threatened his child. So he said leave my child and take the car. They said if you tell the British about this we will come back and kill your child.

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FALLUJAH, Iraq - Guns drawn and tensed for battle, U.S. forces locked down a neighborhood for a house-to-house search Thursday, targeting attackers who killed one American soldier and wounded five others in the latest eruption of anti-occupation violence.

It was at least the sixth U.S. soldier killed in attacks in Iraq (news - web sites) over the past two weeks.

There was blood everywhere," said Jamal Hussein Ali, 27, who arrived minutes after the RPG exploded. "We saw the American troops shouting and running. They crossed the street, broke down a shop door and took cover inside."

Scores of Army military police sealed off the area and went into houses. At least one man was taken away in plastic handcuffs — apparently for weapons possession. Military police also photographed crowds of spectators...

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Iraqis carrying hammers and axes yesterday began to demolish a police station in the troubled city of Falluja in a public act of defiance against the US military.
In what appeared to be a well-organised operation a crowd of labourers, mostly young men and boys, sawed off railings and tore out the metal window frames from the three-storey building. Others, using mallets and metal poles, knocked down the outer wall brick by brick, and were slowly trying to break apart the building itself.

Although the al-Tawhid police station was ransacked in the days immediately after the war, the US military had used the building intermittently as a centre for operations in Falluja and were negotiating to set up a full time base there.

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A rumour is swiftly spreading in the eastern Iraqi city of Kut that 40 men alleged to have looted a local textile factory are to be executed by US Marines and their heads put on spikes at the city gates.

"Don't tell them it isn't so," Lt Col Erik Grobowski of the Marines told staff of the embryonic TV Kut who asked their new "masters" how they should report the disturbing rumours on the evening news.

"We're here to kick ass and we don't want folks to think they can get away with murder, so let them think the Marines are prepared to top 'em all if they step out of line," he said.

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[ 08 June 2003: Message edited by: majorvictory ]

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The Marines are helping a 12-strong team to establish a television station in Kut to disseminate information about post-war Iraq - something the citizens are hungry for after being fed a diet of propaganda for years ... the US military are determined to control the way that news is delivered.

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Originally posted by majorvictory:
We want to be feared not loved, say US Marines

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Irony is dead, people. It really is.

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One US soldier was killed and another injured when their unit was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in Baghdad, the US army said today.
The two men, serving with the 82nd Airborne Division's 2nd Brigade Combat Team, were attacked while on duty at a waste collection point in the south-west of the city yesterday.

They were evacuated to a field hospital for treatment, but one later died from his injuries. The second man was still in a critical condition, according to a statement released by US central command in Doha, Qatar.

The statement said that the soldiers were manning the collection point when a van containing four passengers stopped in a nearby alley.

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BASRA, Iraq -- The doctor in charge of the children's cancer ward at the Mother and Child Hospital spoke passionately of her patients' needs as tears rolled down her face.

"We will run out of drugs in two to three weeks," said Dr. Janan Ghalib Hassan, the words coming rapid-fire in clipped, British-trained English.

She ticked off a list of health and hospital needs: drugs, medical equipment, electricity, clean water -- and safety.

"I am afraid to ride to work in my car," she said, because of recent robberies, rapes, kidnappings and murders.

"The U.S. and British forces made many promises, but until now they have done nothing here."

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U.S. Troops Storm Sunni Muslim Enclave

Thursday June 12, 2003 5:39 PM

By JIM KRANE

Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Thousands of U.S. troops stormed through a Sunni Muslim enclave centered on the Tigris River north of Baghdad on Thursday, day three of a massive operation aimed at cracking down on Saddam Hussein loyalists.

Fighter jets, attack helicopters and unmanned aerial drones have backed up ground troops during Operation Peninsula Strike, one of the U.S. military's biggest assaults since Saddam's ouster. About 400 Iraqis have been captured.

Early Thursday, U.S. fighter jets bombed what they said was ``terrorist training camp'' north of Baghdad. Hours later, Iraqi forces shot down a U.S. helicopter gunship, and a U.S. F-16 fighter-bomber went down southwest of Baghdad for reasons yet determined, the U.S. Central Command said. The crews of both aircraft were unharmed.

``As we receive actionable intelligence, we strike hard and with lethal force,'' Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, the U.S. ground forces commander in Iraq, said in a briefing Thursday. ``Iraq will be a combat zone for some time.''

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Originally posted by DrConway:

Irony is dead, people. It really is.

When the US marines are acting the same way as Saddam Hussein's old Republican Guard and secret police did, it just defies any attempt to rationalize how the new boss is any different from the old boss.

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Yep.

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TIKRIT, Iraq -- On the last night of his young life, Pvt. Jesse Halling was hunkered down with his squad in a looted Iraqi police station in Saddam Hussein's gritty home town, wet with sweat in his bulletproof vest and helmet, waiting for something bad to happen. It was what one soldier called "the witching hours."

On June 7, the ghosts came out -- armed with rocket-propelled grenades -- and found a 19-year-old recruit from Indianapolis. Since Baghdad fell on April 9, 66 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq, in vehicle and munitions accidents, drownings, medical emergencies and increasingly, like Halling, in ambushes. In the last 19 days, 10 soldiers have been gunned down in assaults that appear increasingly organized and sophisticated, carried out by determined foes that the Pentagon now calls "subversives."

This is the story of one of those soldiers.

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BALAD, Iraq -- Wailing and reciting verses, dozens of Iraqi villagers on Saturday mourned five civilians they said U.S. forces killed in their hunt for Saddam Hussein loyalists, the biggest American operation since the war ended two months ago.

Jaafar Obeid, a farmer, told The Associated Press that five male relatives - including a 70-year-old man and three of his sons, - were shot by American troops, apparently mistaking them for fleeing militants who had just attacked a U.S. tank patrol.

Lt.-Col. Greg Julian, a U.S. military spokesman, could not confirm reports of civilian casualties in the operation. "If they're wearing civilian clothing and shooting weapons at you, they are not classified as civilians," he said Saturday.

But townspeople said the five men were trying to douse fires in their wheat fields Friday, set by U.S. flares, when soldiers shot them. Mourners set up three tents for funeral services in Elheed, the village near Balad where residents said the men were killed.

Friday morning, an American officer came and apologized to the family for the deaths, which have devastated the village, Obeid said.

"This action will bring harm to them (the Americans)," the farmer said. "They should have checked before opening fire. They have eliminated a whole family."

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THULUYA, Iraq -- Along orange groves and orchards of figs and pears watered by the timeless churn of the Tigris River, Hashim Mohammed Aani often sat before a bird cage he built of scrap wood and a loose lattice of chicken coop wire.

A chubby 15-year-old with a mop of curly black hair and a face still rounded by adolescence, he was quiet, painfully shy. Awkward might be the better word, his family said. For hours every day, outside a house perched near the riverbank, the youngest of six children languidly watched his four canaries and nightingale. Even in silence, they said, the birds were his closest companions.

On Monday morning, after a harrowing raid into this town by U.S. troops that deployed gunships, armored vehicles and soldiers edgy with anticipation, the family found Aani's body, two gunshots to his stomach, next to a bale of hay and a rusted can of vegetable oil. With soldiers occupying a house nearby, his corpse lay undisturbed for hours under a searing sun.

Lt. Arthur Jimenez, who commanded a platoon of the 4th Infantry Division near the house, said he did not know the details of Hashim's death. But he feared the boy was unlucky. "That person," he said, "was probably in the wrong place at the wrong time."

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15 June 2003

US troops, in their largest military operation since the end of the war, are trying to stamp out resistance in farming villages along the Tigris river north of Baghdad, but their massive use of firepower has infuriated Iraqis in the area.

"I suppose it was a successful operation from the American point of view," said Salah al-Jaburi bitterly as he pointed to two bloodstained quilts on which two men died when US troops had tried to arrest them in the middle of the night in the village of Aldhluaia, earlier in the week.

The quilts were on display beside a tent where several hundred villagers had gathered to mourn three men from Aldhluaia killed in "Operation Peninsula Strike" during which 4,000 US soldiers last week occupied a string of prosperous fruit-growing villages near the town of Balad, 60 miles north of the capital.

Mawlud al-Jaburi, who was arrested along with 450 other people, said he was mystified why Aldhluaia had been singled out. "We were pleased when Saddam fell," he insisted. "We have not fired a single bullet at the Americans." According to Mr Jaburi, all the villagers are members of the large Jubur tribe, which had been out of favour with Saddam Hussein for the last 12 years because senior officers from the tribe were involved in two attempted coups against him.

The purpose of Peninsula Strike, which started on Monday, appears to have been to lay on a massive display of force to show that the US is truly in control of central Iraq, in the wake of a series of pin-prick guerrilla attacks that have left 40 American soldiers dead since the beginning of May. If so, the operation has been counter-productive. "Before I was afraid of Saddam. Now I am afraid of the Americans," said Mohammed, an elderly farmer too frightened to give his family name.

It is not clear how many Iraqis were killed in the operation. On Friday a US spokesman said 27 Iraqis had been killed after a group of fighters fired rocket-propelled grenades at a tank, although officers on the ground gave a much lower figure. The Americans counter-attacked with Bradley fighting vehicles and Apache helicopters. Although there have been very few guerrilla attacks, US troops are responding to any perceived threat by immediate use of their overwhelming firepower.

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Who the hell does Dubya think he is that he can subject scared barely-adult men to this? I mean, that one kid is 19. When I was 19 I was just getting into a technical school.

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I believe, Dr. Conway, that 19 is a fairly normal age for military service in any country. A lot of 19 year old Canadians died in the two World wars.

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Arrests are often made on vague or tainted information. In Baquba, a fruit-growing town 30 miles north-west of Baghdad, two queues had formed yesterday at the local police station. One consisted of informers denouncing members of the former regime and the other of relatives of detainees trying to find out where they were being held.

"The problem is that anybody can tell the Americans that a man is an Ali Baba - a looter - just because they have some money," complained Salman Shamar, who is vainly trying to find two of his cousins at the 4th Infantry Division's base inside an old Iraqi air base near the town.

He was not having much success. American soldiers said he should inquire at the police station for his relatives. He said he had just been there and had been told to go the base. "We don't know what those idiots are doing over there at the police station. We don't have a list of detainees here," said an exasperated US soldier at the entrance to the base.

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Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday June 19, 2003
The Guardian

Hussein Saber shook with fury as he lay on a dirty hospital bed last night and told the story of another day in Baghdad, a city torn apart by killings, misunderstanding and the startling failures of America's military occupation.
Yesterday Hussein, 33, should have collected a $50 (£30) emergency payment which all Iraq's now unemployed soldiers are due to receive. The money did not arrive and so he and hundreds of other frustrated young men poured towards the gates of the US-led authority to protest.

Within minutes he was shot in his right side by a young, nervous American soldier. Hussein survived but two other Iraqis standing next to him in the crowd were killed.

Just a few miles away in the centre of the city, gunmen in a passing car shot dead one American soldier and wounded another as they guarded a propane gas station. It was another strike against the US military by an increasingly bold guerrilla resistance force intent on destabilising the reconstruction.

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BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- A U.S. soldier was killed and two were wounded when a military ambulance was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade south of Baghdad, U.S. Central Command said Thursday.

The extent of the injuries was not clear.

The soldiers from the 804th Medical Brigade were transporting a patient injured in another incident to the 28th Combat Army Support Hospital, Central Command said.

"The ambulance was clearly marked with a big red cross," Capt. John Morgan said. "No regard for human life."

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Al-Jazeera television said three U.S. soldiers had been killed in Iraq on Thursday in an attack by gunmen, and showed pictures of a burning military vehicle.
It quoted eye witnesses in al-Doura, south of the capital Baghdad, as saying that a U.S. military column had been disabled after coming under fire. It said the U.S. military had immediately removed the three bodies.

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Sergeant First Class John Meadows summed up the prevailing attitude amongst his colleagues telling the Evening Standard that Iraqi fighters were dressed in civilian clothes.

"You can't distinguish between who's trying to kill you and who's not," he said.

"Like, the only way to get through s*** like that was to concentrate on getting through it by killing as many people as you can, people you know are trying to kill you. Killing them first and getting home."

And in an admission that directly contrasts with the line coming out from the Pentagon's spin doctors Specialist Corporal Michael Richardson added: "There was no dilemma when it came to shooting people who were not in uniform, I just pulled the trigger.

"It was up close and personal the whole time, there wasn't a big distance. If they were there, they were enemy, whether in uniform or not. Some were, some weren't."

Describing the scene during combat Richardson admitted shooting injured soldiers and leaving them to die.

He said: "S***, I didn't help any of them. I wouldn't help the f******. There were some you let die. And there were some you double-tapped."

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"You can't distinguish between who's trying to kill you and who's not," he said.

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A grunt in Vietnam (well, thousands of them probably said this) said exactly the same thing on the PBS series, "Vietnam: a Television History."

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"You can't distinguish between who's trying to kill you and who's not," he said.

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BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. troops psyched up on a bizarre musical reprise from Vietnam war film ``Apocalypse Now'' before crashing into Iraqi homes to hunt gunmen on Saturday, as Shi'ite Muslims rallied against the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

With Wagner's ``Ride of the Valkyries'' still ringing in their ears and the clatter of helicopters overhead, soldiers rammed vehicles into metal gates and hundreds of troops raided houses in the western city of Ramadi after sunrise as part of a drive to quell a spate of attacks on U.S. forces.

A previously unknown group, calling itself the Iraqi National Front of Fedayeen, vowed to intensify assaults on U.S. troops until they leave Iraq.

Before Saturday's robust sweep through Ramadi, 100 km (60 miles) west of Baghdad, soldiers of the First Battalion of the 124th Infantry Regiment psyched themselves up at a base nearby in a musical moment redolent of Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film about the Vietnam war.

Hit-and-run strikes on U.S. troops have been concentrated in Sunni Muslim towns such as Ramadi west and north of Baghdad.

One unit of troops dragged half a dozen men from their homes as women wailed. They seized weapons and a computer disk.

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Electricity is vital to life in the Iraqi capital where the temperature can soar as high as 60C (140F) at the height of summer. Without it there is no air-conditioning, no refrigerators to prevent food rotting and no light in a city terrified by looters. The failure to get the electrical system working has become a symbol for Iraqis in the capital of the general failure of the American occupation to provide living conditions even at the miserable level they enjoyed under Saddam Hussein.

Asked about Baghdad's lack of electricity at an air-conditioned press conference, Paul Bremer, the American head of the occupation authority, looking cool in a dark suit and quiet purple tie, simply asserted that, with a few exceptions, Baghdad was now receiving 20 hours of electricity a day. "It simply isn't true," said one Iraqi, shaking his head in disbelief after listening to Mr Bremer. "Everybody in Baghdad knows it."

Few Iraqis mourn the fall of Saddam but there is a growing, at times almost visceral, hatred of the occupation. "They can take our oil, but at least they should let us have electricity and water," said Tha'ar Abdul Qader, a worker at the Central Teaching Hospital for Children, the main door of which can only be entered by walking through a fast-flowing stream of raw sewage.

Attacks on American troops are still sporadic and not organised centrally, but when one American soldier was shot dead and another wounded by gunmen in a passing car near al-Doura power station, passers-by unanimously said they approved of the attack.

Even the few Iraqis who have joined the Coalition Provisional Authority under Mr Bremer - which operates out of Saddam Hussein's heavily fortified Republican Palace in the centre of the capital - describe the American officials administering Iraq as "living in an air-conditioned fantasy world".

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Coalition military spokesman Col. Guy Shields says loss of life is "regrettable," but that US forces remain in a "combat zone." It is "unrealistic" for soldiers to carry different rifle magazines with live and plastic bullets, he said at a press conference on Thursday.

US troops are rarely trained for police work. But when they deployed briefly to Somalia in early 1995, to provide security for evacuating United Nations staff and troops, they expected protests and carried the latest anti-riot gear: "Bee-sting" hand grenades that sprayed hard rubber pellets, and nozzle goop-guns that blasted immobilizing glue.

Col. Shields said troops in Iraq that might face violent demonstrators carry no non-lethal crowd control devices, and that he was unaware of any requests by US commanders for such anti-riot gear.

That is a surprise to the family of Tariq Hussein al-Mashledani, a junior officer killed Wednesday. Under a mourning tent set up in a cramped alley, in Mr. Al-Mashledani's poor neighborhood, the talk is of how the US has wasted the goodwill felt by many Iraqis in the afterglow of the fall of Iraq's dictator.

"They speak of democracy and freedom, but we get exactly the opposite," says al-Mashledani's bearded brother, Aladin Hussein. "If [demonstrators] throw stones, do they shoot back? There are a lot of ways to disperse a crowd. If you must shoot, aim at the legs."

Al-Mashledani was taken by stretcher by US troops, and a copy of his medical report by a US military doctor - kept in a plastic bag by his brother - makes clear that he arrived alive "after receiving [two] gunshot wounds at assassin gate, apparently from US forces." The reports says he resisted attempts to help him.

But when family and friends retrieved the body, they say they inexplicably found a third wound - a wound that they say witnesses at the demonstration did not notice, when al-Mashledani was whisked away for treatment.

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For Borell, who has been in Iraq since April 17, what happened with the injured children has made him question what it means to be an American soldier.

``What would it have cost us to treat these children? A few dollars perhaps. Some investment of time and resources,'' said Borell, 30, of Toledo, Ohio.

``I cannot imagine the heartlessness required to look into the eyes of a child in horrid pain and suffering and, with medical resources only a brief trip up the road, ignore their plight as though they are insignificant,'' he added.

Maj. David Accetta, public affairs officer with the 3rd Corps Support Command, said the children's condition did not fall into a category that requires Army doctors to care for them. Only patients with conditions threatening life, limb or eyesight and not resulting from a chronic illness are considered for treatment.

``Our goal is for the Iraqis to use their own existing infrastructure and become self-sufficient, not dependent on U.S. forces for medical care,'' Accetta said in an e-mail to AP.

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``Our goal is for the Iraqis to use their own existing infrastructure and become self-sufficient, not dependent on U.S. forces for medical care,'' Accetta said in an e-mail to AP.

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Six British military police officers have been killed and eight other military personnel wounded in two separate incidents in southern Iraq.
Both incidents happened near the town of Amara, 200 kilometres (125 miles) north-west of Iraq's second city Basra.
...

There were separate reports on Tuesday of attacks on US troops in Ramadi, to the west of Baghdad.

Up to five Iraqis are reported to have been killed when US forces retaliated after coming under fire. Two Americans are said to have been injured.

A US military spokesman, quoted by the Associated Press news agency, said some 25 attacks on American-led coalition forces in Iraq had taken place on Monday and Tuesday.

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QAIM, Iraq, June 23 -- Ahmed Hamad, a burly shepherd and smuggler, awoke to his mother's shouts. He looked at his watch. It was 1:10 a.m., he recalled. He gazed across a horizon illuminated by destruction, where U.S. aircraft were raining fire on four trucks. About a half-hour later, he said, a missile slammed into his house, killing his sister-in-law and her 1-year-old daughter.

The rest of his family, 10 in all, survived. On a hot summer night in Iraq's western desert, they had been sleeping outside on cots.

"Praise be to God," Hamad, 27, said from his hospital bed, shaking his head.

U.S. officials backed away from their initial assessments of whether the attack early Thursday near the village of Dhib killed top officials in the former Iraqi government, saying they had picked up no indications since the attack that Saddam Hussein or his sons, Uday and Qusay, had been in the convoy.

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Police officer Abbas Faddhel said the British troops shot dead four civilian protesters yesterday during a demonstration in the south-eastern town of Majar al-Kabir.

Armed civilians killed two of the British soldiers at the scene of the protest - in front of the mayor's office - then chased four others to a police station where they killed them after a two-hour gun battle, he said. According to reports, witnesses in Majar said the deaths followed days of tension due to methods used by British forces who were searching for weapons.

Abu Zahraa, a 30-year-old local market trader, said Iraqi civilians were killed by British soldiers during the demonstration against the presence of UK forces in the town. He said the British troops had formally agreed a day earlier to let local police patrol Majar.

Mr Zahraa and another witness, who was not named, said the British soldiers came under attack and retreated to the local police station. Angry townspeople went to their homes to fetch assault rifles, returned to the station and attacked the besieged British soldiers, all of whom died, the witnesses said.

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...

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"But I think it's equally important to put this into context. We do not want to undermine all of the excellent work that has been done by British forces, particularly in and around Basra, to win over the support of the local population.

"I would not want anyone to believe that this particular incident, appalling though it has been, should necessarily affect the excellent progress that has been made in Britain's area of operations," he said.

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Step 1. Remove blinders. Step 2. Open Eyes.

[ 25 June 2003: Message edited by: Sarcasmobri ]

British Troops give 48 hour ultimatum to the town of Majar al-Kabir

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MAJAR AL-KABIR, Iraq (AP) - British forces gave civilian leaders in this town 48 hours to hand over gunmen who killed six British military police after a violent demonstration that left four Iraqis dead, a municipal official said Wednesday.

British military officials were meeting with seven members of the city's administrative council in the nearby town of Amarah, seeking the killers' surrender, said Qassem Nimeh, an official in the mayor's office in Majar al-Kabir.

Townspeople furious over the deaths of four civilians during a demonstration Tuesday in this southern Iraqi town shot and killed six British military police, local police said Wednesday.

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Now, I'm not one to put shoes on other people's feet, but what would the British troops' reaction be if no soldiers had been attacked, and the town administrators demanded the surrender of the troops responsible for the civilian deaths? Nada? Zilch? Perhaps a concerned look or two, followed by an insincere apology?

I, for one, am afraid of what the troops are going to do if their ultimatum is not answered. Hearts and minds, people.

[ 25 June 2003: Message edited by: Sarcasmobri ]

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June 24 — Even as U.S. and British forces struggle to pacify Iraq, another unfinished conflict rages on in Afghanistan, evinced this week by a new offensive by thousands of U.S. and Pakistani troops along the porous Afghan-Pakistani border. Barely reported in the U.S. media, the push into the mountainous border region by U.S. special operations forces and others is only the latest sign of deepening trouble in a country President Bush has promised to rebuild.

U.S. MILITARY officers who recently returned from Afghan duty describe a deteriorating security situation in the country, which is currently patrolled by about 7,000 U.S. troops, primarily from the 82nd Airborne Division, along with a 5,000-strong United Nations peacekeeping mission confined to the capital, Kabul.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld last month declared that Afghanistan had shifted “from major combat activity to a period of ... stabilization and reconstruction.” Yet interviews with these officers, combined with assessments from independent experts, suggest that forces loyal to the ousted Taliban leadership may be preparing the ground for a comeback attempt.

“I would describe it as a very difficult situation,” says an officer who recently retired after a year in Afghanistan. “The trend there is not what I would call good.”

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BAGHDAD, Iraq - Assailants launched a wave of ambushes against U.S. forces in Iraq (news - web sites), dropping grenades from an overpass, blowing up a vehicle with a roadside bomb and destroying a civilian SUV traveling with U.S. troops, soldiers and Iraqi police said Thursday. Two U.S. soldiers and two Iraqi civilians were killed.

The onslaught was part of a spiraling series of attacks on coalition forces despite assurances that the troops are mopping up resistance. On Tuesday, six British soldiers were killed in a southern town, undercoring the spread of anti-coalition violence.

In latest wave of attacks, a bomb exploded Thursday by a U.S. military vehicle on the road leading to Baghdad's airport, killing one U.S. soldier and injuring another.

The airport road, heavily used by U.S. forces, has been the scene of a series of ambushes using trip wires dangling from overpasses or grenades tossed from bridges. Last month, two U.S. soldiers were killed and two injured when a Humvee detonated an anti-tank mine hidden under debris on the highway.

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WASHINGTON (AFP) - US attack helicopters led an intensive search north of Baghdad for two US soldiers who appear to have been abducted from their post along with their Humvee, arms and equipment, a US defense official said.

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To recap, it's been a rough couple of days for Uncle Sam...

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Between Wednesday and Thursday, assailants blew up a U.S. military vehicle with a roadside bomb, dropped grenades from an overpass, destroyed a civilian SUV traveling with U.S. troops, demolished an oil pipeline and fired an apparent rocket-propelled grenade at a U.S. Army truck.

In the latest reported attack, a member of a U.S. special operations force was killed and eight were wounded Thursday morning by hostile fire southwest of Baghdad, the U.S. military said, giving no further details.

Also Thursday, a bomb exploded on the Baghdad airport road, killing a U.S. soldier and wounding another, the military said. The road — heavily used by U.S. forces — has been the scene of several attacks using trip wires dangling from overpasses or grenades tossed from bridges.

In another ambush, assailants threw grenades at a U.S. and Iraqi civilian convoy in west Baghdad, killing two Iraqi employees of the national electricity authority, U.S. soldiers and Iraqi police said. The convoy had U.S. Humvees at the front and the back and two Iraqi civilian vehicles in the middle. The victims were traveling in the same car.

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[ 26 June 2003: Message edited by: black_dog ]

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BAGHDAD, Iraq - Two American soldiers missing for days from their checkpoint post north of Baghdad have been found dead, the military said Saturday.

News of the killings came amid a rush of guerrilla-style attacks and sabotage that has marred U.S. efforts to re-establish order in Iraq (news - web sites) and increased the American death toll. Of at least 200 U.S. troops killed since the start of war March 20, about a third died since major combat was officially declared over May 1.

The soldiers found killed — Sgt. 1st Class Gladimir Philippe, 37, of Linden, N.J., and Pfc. Kevin Ott, 27, of Columbus, Ohio — had been reported missing Wednesday from the town of Balad, 25 miles north of Baghdad.

Their bodies were found 20 miles northwest of the capital, the military said, giving no further details. Soldiers on the ground and using Apache attack helicopters had scoured the area, and U.S. interrogators have been questioning at least six men arrested in the soldiers' disappearance.

At least 61 U.S. troops have died since May 1 — at least 23 of them in attacks.

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Dark discovery

I still do not know why it caught my eye, why I looked ahead when I did - but I glimpsed a dark shape lying in the middle of the road.

The driver swerved to avoid it, braking sharply. As we passed I looked through window and caught sight of a body. Not the body of an animal, but the body of a child.

I asked the driver to stop, and we drove back. It was indeed the body of a young boy, his blood-soaked clothes scattered across the road. A few metres away, a girl is crying, screaming. She is inconsolable.

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By SHAILA K. DEWAN

BASRA, Iraq, June 28 — Hianeer al-Hay grimaced but did not cry when the attendant took her right arm, covered in dried blood, to give her an injection. It was 9 p.m. one recent evening at Basra General Hospital, and Hianeer, 9, was the seventh gunshot victim since noon.

"She was sitting on the doorstep of the house, and the bullet came from the sky," said her mother, Hania Mahmud. Hianeer, asked if she had been frightened, shrugged and said only that she wanted to go home so she could study for her final exam in Arabic the next day.

Shootings are commonplace in Basra these days. At the hospitals, it is clear that this city remains a dangerous place.

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BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 30 — An Iraqi businessman detained during a raid on his home says U.S. interrogators deprived him of sleep, forced him to kneel naked and kept him bound hand and foot with a bag over his head for eight days.

Interviewed June 20 and Monday, Al-Abally said U.S. troops stormed his home April 30, shooting his brother and taking al-Abally and his 80-year-old father into custody — apparently believing they had information on the whereabouts of a top official in Saddam Hussein's regime, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri.

The three men were all low-level members of Saddam's Baath Party, but al-Douri was not a family acquaintance, Al-Abally said.

The brother, Dureid, shot at the troops breaking in, apparently mistaking them for looters, the family said. Al-Abally said he was told during his interrogation at Baghdad International Airport that his brother had died.

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BAGHDAD (AFP) - Four US soldiers were killed and two others wounded in a rocket-propelled grenade attack on their vehicle by unknown assailants in central Baghdad, witnesses told AFP.

The attack occurred at 10:00 am (0600 GMT) when assailants fired an RPG at a US Humvee light multi-wheeled vehicle near a gas station in the al-Mustansiriya neighborhood, they said.

Four US troops were killed and two others wounded, they said. The casualties were immediately removed from the scene.

Witnesses said the Humvee was totally burnt.

An Iraqi civilian was also wounded and taken to hospital, said the witnesses, confirming that his 18-seat transport bus parked by the gas station was completely torched.

US troops immediately cordoned off the area, preventing journalists from approaching the scene.

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BAGHDAD, June 30 -- To Staff Sgt. Charles Pollard, the working-class suburb of Mashtal is a "very, very, very, very bad neighborhood." And he sees just one solution.

"U.S. officials need to get our [expletive] out of here," said the 43-year-old reservist from Pittsburgh, who arrived in Iraq with the 307th Military Police Company on May 24. "I say that seriously. We have no business being here. We will not change the culture they have in Iraq, in Baghdad. Baghdad is so corrupted. All we are here is potential people to be killed and sitting ducks."

To Sgt. Sami Jalil, a 14-year veteran of the local police force, the Americans are to blame. He and his colleagues have no badges, no uniforms. The soldiers don't trust them with weapons. In his eyes, his U.S. counterparts have already lost the people's trust.

"We're facing the danger. We're in the front lines. We're taking all the risks, only us," said the 33-year-old officer. "They're arrogant. They treat all the people as if they're criminals."

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BAGHDAD, July 2 -- Two months after Iraqis fired AK-47s into the night sky to celebrate the resumption of electrical service, crippling blackouts have returned to the capital and the rest of the country, impeding the restoration of public order and economic activity, and creating a new focus of anger at the U.S. occupation.

In Baghdad, a vast city of high-rise buildings, bustling markets and scorching summer temperatures, most residents received more than 20 hours of electricity a day before the war -- enough to run elevators, air conditioners and other staples of modern life. Today, the capital got about eight hours of power. On Tuesday, it was even less. And for a few days last week, there was none.

The persistent blackouts -- U.S. and Iraqi specialists blame sabotage, looting, war damage and the failure of old equipment -- have transformed a city that once was regarded as the most advanced in the Arab world to a place of pre-industrial privation where shopkeepers hawk their wares on the sidewalk, housewives store food in iceboxes and families sleep outdoors.

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BALAD, Iraq, July 4 -- As many as 50 resistance fighters ambushed a U.S. military patrol early this morning, while another group wounded at least 17 soldiers in a mortar strike on an American base near here, bold attacks that demonstrated new organizational and weapons capabilities, soldiers and military officials said.

Most attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq have involved small groups of gunmen, usually fewer than a half-dozen. A U.S. official said he had not heard of another attack involving as many as 50 people working together. "This is unusual and concerning," the official said. "A group of 50 suggests a degree of organization we haven't seen before."

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RAMADI, Iraq - A bomb blast turned a parade of U.S.-trained police cadets into a deadly zone Saturday, killing seven and injuring dozens in an attack U.S. officials blamed on insurgents targeting Iraqis who work with Americans.

A British television journalist also was shot and killed outside the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad on Saturday in another sign of unrest.

In northern Iraq, U.S. troops raided a Turkish special forces office and detained 11 soldiers, further straining U.S.-Turkey diplomatic ties. A Turkish newspaper reported the men were detained after rumors that they were plotting to kill a senior Iraqi official in Kirkuk, 175 miles north of Baghdad.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the detentions an "ugly incident" and demanded the soldiers' release. The United States was responding, releasing some of the soldiers by Saturday evening, but not all, Erdogan said.

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"It was Rahad's turn to hide. The nine-year-old girl found a good place to conceal herself from her playmates, the game of hide and seek having lasted some two hours along a quiet residential street in the town of Fallujah, on the banks of the Euphrates. But while Rahad crouched behind the wall of a neighbour's house, someone else - not playing the game - had spotted her, and her friends; someone above. The pilot of an American A-10 'tank-buster' aircraft, hovering in a figure of eight. He was flying an airborne weapon equipped with some of the most advanced and accurate equipment for 'precision target recognition' in the Pentagon's arsenal. And at 5.30pm on 29 March, he launched his weapon at the street scene below.

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AGHDAD, Iraq, Monday, July 7 — Three American soldiers were killed in about a 12-hour period Sunday and early today in Baghdad amid growing signs of guerrilla resistance to American forces.

The first death occurred about 12:35 p.m. on Sunday when an American soldier who was accompanying United States officials visiting Baghdad University was fatally shot by an unidentified gunman, witnesses and American officials said.

The next death occurred at 9:30 Sunday night when a soldier from the First Armored Division was killed while chasing two Iraqi gunmen. One of the Iraqi gunmen was killed and one was wounded, said a military spokesman, Specialist Lorente Giovanni.

The third soldier was killed at 1 this morning while he was on patrol in a Baghdad neighborhood when an explosive device struck his vehicle, Specialist Giovanni said.

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Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.

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On the day U.S. soldiers occupied Baghdad, draped the American flag over Saddam Hussein's statue and pulled it down, 103 GIs had died in the Iraq war. The number killed since that supposedly triumphal moment on April 9 may double in this coming week, in a war that an American general now admits is ongoing.

The total number of American soldiers killed since the toppling of Saddam's statue is 93 by July 4, including the nine Americans killed in the bombing in Saudi Arabia. That makes a total of 196 dead so far, not including the six British soldiers killed last month.

The media is being forced to recognize this reality, but continues to minimize the numbers. Using the definition "killed in hostile encounters" and May 1 as the date when President Bush declared the cessation of hostilities, the reported death toll is lowered to "about 24" Americans, according to the New York Times front-page spin based on figures from Paul Bremer III. (NYT, July 4). The official non-fatal casualty number acknowledged since May 1 is 177 Americans. Most of the dead and wounded are grunts, "low-ranking ground troops who are performing mundane activities like buying a video, going out on patrol, or guarding a trash pit."

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BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Two U.S. soldiers have been killed in separate attacks in Iraq when their convoys came under fire, U.S. military officials said Thursday.

A soldier of the Army's 4th Infantry Division died Wednesday night while riding near the north-central city of Tikrit in a convoy hit by a rocket-propelled grenade.

Tikrit is the hometown of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Hours earlier Wednesday, another soldier was shot and killed south of Baghdad near Mahmudiyah when his convoy was hit by small-arms fire.

U.S. forces in Ramadi and Balad also came under mortar fire overnight, officials said. No casualties were reported.

The Pentagon said more than 1,000 U.S. troops have been wounded in Iraq since March 20, when a U.S.-led airstrike started the war.

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July 9 (Bloomberg) -- Turkey warned the U.S. that its troops will fire back at U.S. soldiers if another attempt is made to arrest Turkish soldiers in Iraq, Milliyet daily reported, without saying how it obtained the information.

Turkish Military Chief of Staff Hilmi Ozkok issued the warning during a meeting yesterday with General James Jones, the U.S. commander in Europe, Milliyet said.

Jones visited Ankara for two hours yesterday after Ozkok called the detention of Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces last weekend a ``crisis of confidence'' between the two allies. The 11 Turkish soldiers, who were detained by U.S. forces in northern Iraq Friday on suspicion they were involved in an alleged plot to harm Iraqi officials, were released Sunday.

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BAGHDAD, Iraq – Insurgents launched fresh assaults on U.S. soldiers in Iraq, killing at least two servicemen and wounding a third in shootings and rocket-propelled grenade attacks, the military said Thursday.

A soldier was fatally shot Wednesday evening near the city of Mahmudiyah, 15 miles south of Baghdad, said Spc. Nicci Trent, a spokeswoman for the military.

Another soldier was killed and one wounded in a rocket-propelled grenade attack late Wednesday near Tikrit, 120 miles north of Baghdad, Trent said. The soldiers were taken to a nearby medical facility, but one of them died.

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Mr Bush blamed the continuing attacks on US troops on "apologists for Saddam Hussein" and insisted the US was making "steady progress" in establishing security and rebuilding the country.

The Pentagon has reported the deaths of 65 American service personnel - many of them as a result of hostile fire - in Iraq since 1 May when Mr Bush declared that major combat was over.

On Wednesday alone:

One soldier was killed and another injured in a grenade attack on a convoy near Tikrit

A US soldier was shot dead near Mahmudiya in an attack on his convoy

A third soldier died in a "non-hostile gunshot incident" in Iraq

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Mr Bush blamed the continuing attacks on US troops on "apologists for Saddam Hussein" and insisted the US was making "steady progress" in establishing security and rebuilding the country.

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By Jamie Tarabay, Associated Press, 7/11/2003 14:18
ABU GHRAIB, Iraq (AP) Khayriyat Taaban squatted to rest in the blistering sun, her head-to-toe black abaya billowing in the furnace-like wind. Every day, she's been making the long walk to look for her son at Abu Ghraib, Saddam Hussein's most notorious prison.

The prison which under Saddam was dreaded for its torture chambers and mass executions is open again, now run by Iraq's American occupiers. And Iraqis still fear it.

The Americans, who have tried but in many cases failed to convince Iraqis that they are liberators, say they're unhappy about reopening the prison, but had no choice. Apparently recognizing the public relations problem, the Americans replaced a Saddam portrait at the prison with a big sign in English and Arabic: ''America is a friend of all Iraqi people.''

During Saddam's rule, just the words Abu Ghraib struck terror in the hearts of Iraqis. The sprawling, high-walled compound west of Baghdad was crowded, housing political prisoners alongside murderers. Saddam's son Qusai, who ran the country's feared internal security operation, was said to have routinely ordered executions for no other reason than to reduce the prison population.

Nearby is a nameless graveyard where executed inmates were buried, and since Saddam's fall hundreds of Iraqis have come to the site, digging up the earthen mounds to search for their loved ones' bodies.

''The people who have been in it don't like the idea of it opening again,'' said Bradford Clark, from the U.S.-led coalition's office of humanitarian assistance and reconstruction. He has interviewed former prisoners as part of research on abuses carried out by Saddam's regime.

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Lack of planning contributed to chaos in Iraq

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WASHINGTON - The small circle of senior civilians in the Defense Department who dominated planning for postwar Iraq failed to prepare for the setbacks that have erupted over the past two months.

The officials didn't develop any real postwar plans because they believed that Iraqis would welcome U.S. troops with open arms and Washington could install a favored Iraqi exile leader as the country's leader. The Pentagon civilians ignored CIA and State Department experts who disputed them, resisted White House pressure to back off from their favored exile leader and when their scenario collapsed amid increasing violence and disorder, they had no backup plan.

Today, American forces face instability in Iraq, where they are losing soldiers almost daily to escalating guerrilla attacks, the cost of occupation is exploding to almost $4 billion a month and withdrawal appears untold years away.

"There was no real planning for postwar Iraq," said a former senior U.S. official who left government recently.

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Sitting ducks for snipers' bullets, far from home and unable to contact their families, US troops in Iraq are finding their morale slipping away. Lee Gordon talks to servicemen and women for whom victory in the Gulf now has a hollow ring

'We didn't win this war, not at all," said reserve infantryman Eric Holt, on guard outside the Republican Palace in Baghdad. "I don't know what I'm doing here and I don't like what's happening in this city," continued the 28-year-old from New York State. "It ain't right for the folks here. You know, there are a whole lot of our girls getting pregnant just so they can go home quick."

Morale among troops in the Iraqi capital has plunged, not least because of new orders that could see them there for a year instead of six months. Four soldiers have been shot by snipers or at close range near Baghdad University in the last seven days, in apparently random killings similar to that of the British journalist Richard Wild last weekend. The 24-year-old former British army officer was killed by a single shot to the back of his head after leaving the university, where he had been meeting Islamic groups.

The investigation into Mr Wild's death has been hampered by the decision of the military police to withdraw from the campus, where religious edicts have appeared on the walls ordering females to cover their heads. Only one company of about 100 former New York and LA army policemen is responsible for investigating crimes, and the order to stay away from the university means it has not been able to interview witnesses or find forensic evidence such as the spent bullet. Meanwhile Mr Wild's body is understood to be at the airport waiting transfer to Britain. The British embassy has declined to say more.

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NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door. But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.

Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).

On the edge of Baghdad International Airport, US military commanders have built a tent city that human rights groups are comparing to the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.

Every day, relatives scuff their way along the dirt track to reach the razor wire barricades surrounding Abu Ghraib, where they plead in vain for information about the whereabouts of the missing.

The response from impassive American sentries is to point to a sign, scrawled in red felt-tip pen on a piece of cardboard hanging on the barbed wire, which says: “No visits are allowed, no information will be given and you must leave.”

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From Reuters Report On Same Incident:

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But the human cost is becoming all too clear as U.S. forces come under daily attack in Iraq. The attacks have continued despite a crackdown by U.S. troops in areas north of the capital, once a hotbed for Saddam Hussein loyalists.

The body of the dead soldier lay on the highway covered with a yellow sheet as the two wounded men received treatment. Helicopters hovered above and U.S. soldiers stood guard, pointing their machineguns toward the edge of the road and peering through binoculars for other possible attackers.

About 40 Iraqis walked from their neighborhood and watched.

"We are happy because this is an occupation," said Mansour Badri, a teenager who lives in a village nearby. "The Americans lied to us when they said they would save us from Saddam. They just want to occupy our country."

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BAGHDAD, Iraq -- A U.S. soldier and an eight-year-old Iraqi child were killed in and around the capital Wednesday, as pro-Saddam Hussein insurgents unleashed a string of violent attacks on the eve of a recently banned Baath Party holiday.

The soldier was killed in a rocket-propelled grenade attack on a supply convoy west of Baghdad near the Abu Ghraib prison, a U.S. military spokesman said.

The grenade blasted into the soldier's truck, hurling him out, as the 20-vehicle convoy passed along a main highway Wednesday morning. Soldiers at first believed a bomb was remotely detonated as the convoy passed.

Sgt. Diego Baez, who escaped without injury from the truck, wept over his comrade's death.

"We slept next to each other just last night. He was my best friend," Baez said.

U.S. soldiers have come under increasingly ferocious attacks by suspected Saddam loyalists in recent weeks - reaching an average of 12 attacks a day. A total 33 U.S. soldiers have been killed in hostile action since President Bush declared an end to major hostilities on May 1.

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By Sue Pleming

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Fed up with being in Iraq (news - web sites) and demoralized by their role as peacekeepers in a risky place, a group of U.S. soldiers aired their plight on U.S. television Wednesday and said they had lost faith in the Army.

Told several times they would be going home only to have their hopes dashed this week, a small group of soldiers from the 3rd Infantry Division in Iraq, spoke of poor morale and disillusionment with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

"If Donald Rumsfeld were here, I'd ask him for his resignation," one disgruntled soldier told ABC's "Good Morning America" show.

Asked by a reporter what his message would be for Rumsfeld, another said: "I would ask him why we are still here. I don't have any clue as to why we are still in Iraq."

About 146,000 U.S. troops are serving amid mounting security threats in postwar Iraq. The death toll has now equaled the number killed in the 1991 Gulf War

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I request once again that, as soon as this thread is closed, it be archived in the Best of Babble.

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By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, July 16, 2003; 1:18 PM

BAGHDAD, July 16 – The palm-lined road to Baghdad International Airport is six miles long, six lanes wide and one of the most critical commercial and military arteries in this crippled city. It also has emerged as a deadly shooting gallery for attackers trying to kill U.S. soldiers.

There have been dozens of shootings, bombings and landmine explosions in recent weeks on or near the airport road; two soldiers were severely injured today when their Humvee hit a landmine there. At least four U.S. soldiers have been killed there in the past six weeks, including a soldier killed Monday in a rocket-propelled grenade attack that also wounded 10 others.

"It's a nightmare," said Sgt. Leonard Gorley, a soldier guarding today's Humvee wreck, along a road that has become a frightening flash point in a uniquely strategic location.

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"What remains of a beautiful girl called Bedour Hashem lies on a piece of floor at a relative's house, having been discharged by the American military hospital, with no room for her at the local one," Vulliamy wrote. "She is shrivelled and petrified like a dead cat. Her skin is like scorched parchment folded over her bones. Unable to move, she appears as if in some troubled coma, but opens her eyes, with difficulty, to issue an indecipherable cry like a wounded animal."

Then soldiers in American uniforms show up and try to make amends with a chicken.

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[ 17 July 2003: Message edited by: WingNut ]

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Pentagon could start a call-up of as many as 10,000 U.S. National Guard soldiers by this winter to bolster forces in Iraq and offset a lack of troops from allies, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.

Missions in Iraq and Afghanistan have stretched the U.S. military thin, the report said, and soldiers there still face danger every day.

One senior U.S. defense official, asked by the Journal if he had ever seen the Army stretched so thin, said: "Not in my 31 years" of military service.

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The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.

The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.

Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.

America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.

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BAGHDAD, Iraq - Insurgents targeting the U.S. occupation of Iraq (news - web sites) detonated explosives under a military convoy west of Baghdad on Friday, killing an American soldier. U.S. military engineers discovered another bomb in Baghdad but defused it.

The attack on the convoy came Friday afternoon when a bomb was detonated by remote control at a traffic circle near the main bridge over the Euphrates River in Fallujah, a city west of Baghdad, according to Sgt. Amy Abbott, a military spokeswoman. She said a soldier from the 3rd Infantry Division died.

Shopkeeper Abdul Munin Ali, who was swimming in the Euphrates when he heard the explosion, said he saw four soldiers evacuated — three in ambulances and one by helicopter. But a Pentagon (news - web sites) spokeswoman said the dead soldier was the only casualty.

"America is the enemy of God," a crowd chanted as the servicemen towed away a charred Humvee.

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U.S. Plans To Enlist Iraqis in Operations
Civil Force Is Intended To Quell Resistance

CAMP AS SALIYAH, Qatar, July 19 -- U.S. military commanders plan to train and arm thousands of Iraqis to conduct military missions alongside U.S. and British troops in an effort to restore security and quell resistance by forces loyal to ousted president Saddam Hussein, the new head of U.S. military forces in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East said today.

"The Iraqis want to be in the fight," Army Gen. John P. Abizaid said in his first interview since taking over U.S. Central Command this month. "We intend to get them in the fight."

Plans to create a militia-like civil defense force signal a new approach to the task of establishing order in postwar Iraq, where 36 U.S. troops have been killed in attacks since President Bush declared an end to major combat on May 1.

In the wake of the Iraqi military's defeat at the hands of U.S. and British forces, Abizaid said, it "will take years" to create a new, professional Iraqi army. "In the interim, we need civil defense forces that can operate with coalition forces, and eventually alone," he said.

Speaking at Central Command's regional headquarters here in the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar, Abizaid also said that he plans to alter the structure of U.S. forces in Iraq but that the current level of 148,000 U.S. troops will have to be maintained for at least 90 days.

In addition, Abizaid said that U.S. military operations against Hussein loyalists and remnants of his Baath Party are only beginning. After six weeks of offensives in the restive "Sunni triangle" north and west of Baghdad, "I think we are beginning to learn" about the nature of the resistance in Iraq, he said. "I think that we're at the beginning of a process, not the end of it, and it's a long process."

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CHAMAN: Sixteen US troops and several Afghan militiamen were killed in two separate encounters near Spin Buldak and Urzagan on Friday night.

Reports reaching from across the border said, Taliban and Hizb-e-Islami fighters in a joint operation in Urzagan area ambushed a US convoy and killed 12 US troops and four Afghan soldiers. A Taliban commander was also injured seriously.

The Taliban also killed four US soldiers in Spin Boldak during another ambush, reports said. The attackers managed to escape.

Meanwhile, a man was killed and another wounded when they set off a landmine while digging a well in a war-battered area of the Afghan capital on Saturday, police said.

Kabul police chief Basir Salangi said the blast happened near a police station in Chilstoon in the south of the city. “A man was killed and another injured,” he said. Police at the scene said the men triggered the mine, which was likely left over from factional fighting in the 1990s, while digging a well. Kabul has experienced several bomb blasts and rocket attacks since the overthrow of the hardline Taliban regime in 2001, some of which have targeted foreign peacekeepers.

Three US soldiers were wounded when their vehicle was hit by a bomb in northeastern Afghanistan, a US military spokesman said on Saturday.

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Actually, I'm not sure whether I want to close it or not since it seems to be becoming a news archive sort of thread rather than a discussion...maybe I'll make an exception in this case.

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Originally posted by Michelle:
Wow, how did this get so long?

Actually, I'm not sure whether I want to close it or not since it seems to be becoming a news archive sort of thread rather than a discussion...maybe I'll make an exception in this case.

I don't know, I'll think about it. In the meantime, continue!

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20 July 2003

"Up yours, asshole," mutters Sergeant Ronald Black to an Iraqi youth who waves from the back of a passing motor scooter. The tedium is palpable as the sun beats down on Fallujah, a sweltering city of 200,000 mostly Sunni Muslim inhabitants 35 miles west of Baghdad which has become a flashpoint of local resistance to the coalition's occupation of Iraq. "God, I hate these people," he says.

But the sergeant reserves his most blistering remarks for US commanders, who recently announced that his Third Infantry Division will remain in Iraq until the autumn, several months beyond its originally scheduled departure. "We're being told to stay by commanders who just got here a month ago," he complains. "They haven't been here since fucking September like we have."

Even as Tony Blair and President George Bush vow to "stay the course" in Iraq, soldiers like Sgt Black betray the difficulty of the task ahead. Coalition forces rolled over Saddam Hussein's army in three weeks, but winning the peace is proving to be a far more vexing task.

In places like Fallujah, war and the subsequent occupation have brought industry to a standstill, leaving the workforce idle, fuelling resentment and providing cover among a restive populace for the emergence of an active guerrilla resistance.

It is a grim scenario that has some people uttering the dreaded "V-word" ­ Vietnam. On Friday, an influential Sunni imam, speaking outside a mosque in north-west Baghdad, could not resist the Vietnam comparison.

"Both wars ­ Vietnam and Iraq ­ were illegal under international law," the imam said. "And in both, the enemy is the same ­ the United States." He predicted that Islam would provide the same sort of ideological underpinning for Iraqi resistance that Ho Chi Minh's nationalistic Communism did for the Vietnamese four decades ago.

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— BAGHDAD, Iraq (Reuters) - A U.S. soldier and an Iraqi interpreter were killed in a gun and bomb attack in Baghdad on Monday, a U.S. military spokesman said.

"At 10:30 a.m. (2:30 a.m. EDT) a first Armored Division soldier was killed in action and an Iraqi interpreter was also killed. It was a small arms and IED (improvised explosive device) attack," the spokesman said, reading from a statement.

Eyewitnesses reported seeing a U.S. military vehicle blown up on a city street around the same time, although the spokesman could not confirm that this was the fatal incident.

Local journalist Rosie Garthwaite of the Baghdad Bulletin saw the U.S. vehicle destroyed in a blast, leaving a mangled wreck pouring black smoke high into the hot summer morning. Local people told her they had seen two people dead inside.

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BAGHDAD (AP) - Two U.S. soldiers were killed in separate attacks on convoys Wednesday, including one on the outskirts of the northern city of Mosul, where the sons of Saddam Hussein were killed in a firefight the day before.

Specialist Brian Sharkey said the attack near Mosul happened while a military convoy was passing by the town. He said one of the vehicles was destroyed by a roadside bomb. Six soldiers were wounded in the attack. Another convoy was attacked in Ramadi, west of Baghdad. One soldier was killed and two were wounded. The nature of the attack was unclear.

The deaths brought to 155 the number of American soldiers killed since the beginning of the war in Iraq, eight more than died in the 1991 Gulf War.

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By Robert Fisk
22 July 2003, Independent

Now here's a story to shame us all. It's about America's shameful prison camps in Iraq. It's about the beating of prisoners during interrogation.

"Sources" may be a dubious word in journalism right now, but the sources for the beatings in Iraq are impeccable. This story is also about the gunning down of three prisoners in Baghdad, two of them "while trying to escape". But most of all, it's about Qais Mohamed al-Salman. Qais al-Salman is just the sort of guy the US ambassador Paul Bremer and his dead-end assistants need now. He hated Saddam, fled Iraq in 1976, then returned after the "liberation" with a briefcase literally full of plans to help in the restoration of his country's infrastructure and water purification system.

He's an engineer who has worked in Africa, Asia and Europe. He is a Danish citizen. He speaks good English. He even likes America. Or did until 6 June this year.

That day he was travelling in Abu Nawas Street when his car came under American fire. He says he never saw a checkpoint. Bullets hit the tyres and his driver and another passenger ran for their lives. Qais al-Salman stood meekly beside the vehicle. He was carrying his Danish passport, Danish driving licence and medical records.

But let him tell his own story. "A civilian car came up with American soldiers in it. Then more soldiers in military vehicles. I told them I didn't understand what had happened, that I was a scientific researcher. But they made me lie down in the street, tied my arms behind me with plastic-and-steel cuffs and tied up my feet and put me in one of their vehicles."

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The message of all this information - most of it unreported by the media - is that the Americans are no longer safe anywhere in Iraq:
07/23/03: (New Zealand Herald)

In official US military documents, they are called 'attackers' or just plain 'Iraqis.' In the press handouts printed by the occupation authorities, they are - in the grand style of all Soviet propaganda during the Afghan war - "subversive elements."

When Operation Soda Mountain ended on July 17, the propaganda boys of the "Coalition Press Information Centre" outdid even the Russians by boasting that the American raids had "successfully achieved the objectives of neutralising subversive individuals".

But alas they did not. For all the talk of detentions and arms finds - 'Soda Fountain' led to 611 arrests and the reported discovery of 4,297 mortar rounds and 1,346 rocket-propelled grenades - the Iraqi guerrilla war against the United States is becoming increasingly deadly.

On Saturday, for example, a US military map of Baghdad violence showed 10 security 'incidents' over the previous 48 hours. They included the discovery of mortar shells tied together on roads near Baghdad airport and a mortar fired at the occupation army at their base inside the international airport perimeter.

They also included the finding of a dead Iraqi and a wounded man who had been preparing yet another bomb near the airport, this time made of an 82mm shell, wire and blasting caps.

A section of a July 19 report shows just how frequent these guerrilla attacks have become:

"Iqtissadiyin: 19/07 morning (?). Attack on CF (Coalition Forces)," it says.

"Three RPG (rocket-propelled grenades) fired at CF convoy.

"Iqtissadiyin: 18/07 about 00:30. Attack on CF. Small arms fired at CF from overpass and subsequently from nearby houses...

"Hurriyah: 18/07 morning. Attacks on CF. Small arms fired at CF soldier on duty at gas station, four assailants killed when CF returned fire.

"Ash Shabab: 18/07 morning. Attack against Iraqi civilians. Suspect fired three shots at Baghdad Hotel; the vehicle used by the assailant was already spotted while involved into (sic) hostile surveillance of CF position."

And so on and on.

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Three US soldiers were killed when the convoy in which they were travelling was ambushed near the northern Iraqi town of Mosul today.

Saddam Hussein's sons died in a fierce gun battle in the town two days ago.

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The American flag hangs slack on the flagpole. Stewart lays his crutches across his lap. The lanky 20-year-old from Minnesota rubs where his leg was amputated. The throbbing alternates with jolts that feel like electrical shocks. Two Percocets are in his pocket for the plane ride home.

The bed Stewart left behind on Ward 57 will be filled by day's end. Even though major combat operations in Iraq are over, the wounded keep arriving. Twice a week, transport planes land at Andrews Air Force Base, Md., bringing fresh casualties. Nearly 650 soldiers have passed through Walter Reed during Operation Iraqi Freedom, more than half since major combat was officially declared over.

Behind the black iron gates of Walter Reed, the nation's largest military hospital, the broad ambitions of global security are replaced by the singular mission of trying to save a leg.

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Washington had hoped that after the deaths of Saddam Hussein's sons Uday and Qusay on Tuesday attacks on US forces would diminish.

But five Americans have been killed and seven wounded since early Saturday.

The latest incident involved a grenade attack on soldiers from the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force south of Baghdad, in which one man died.

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28 July 2003: (The Independent) Obsessed with capturing Saddam Hussein, American soldiers turned a botched raid on a house in the Mansur district of Baghdad yesterday into a bloodbath, opening fire on scores of Iraqi civilians in a crowded street and killing up to 11, including two children, their mother and crippled father. At least one civilian car caught fire, cremating its occupants.

The vehicle carrying the two children and their mother and father was riddled by bullets as it approached a razor-wired checkpoint outside the house.

Amid the fury generated among the largely middle-class residents of Mansur - by ghastly coincidence, the killings were scarcely 40 metres from the houses in which 16 civilians died when the Americans tried to kill Saddam towards the end of the war in April - whatever political advantages were gained by the killing of Saddam's sons have been squandered. A doctor at the Yarmouk hospital, which received four of the dead, turned on me angrily last night, shouting: "If an American came to my emergency room, maybe I would kill him."

Two civilians, both believed to have been driving with their families, were brought to the Yarmouk, one with abdominal wounds and the other with "his brain outside of his head", according to another doctor.

At the scene of the killings, there was pandemonium. While US troops were loading the bullet-shattered cars on trucks - and trying to stop cameramen filming the carnage - crowds screamed abuse at them. One American soldier a few feet from me climbed into the seat of his
Humvee, threw his helmet on the floor of the vehicle and shouted: "Shit! Shit!"

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Her sister lives in Baghdad. After one of the air raids in a residential neighborhood, her 16 year old son went out to get people out of the wreckage. He came back home, and then thinking it was all clear went out to buy bread, and was killed by a cluster bomb in another attack, while the people were still trying to deal with the first attack.

Another friend of her sister's, a 35 year old widow, was out in her car. She was attacked, pulled from her car, shot and killed, her car stolen.

The majority of the population have weapons. A large number are young men with nothing to do, and they are armed. For amusement, and out of boredom, they will take pot shots at anything. Anarchy prevails.

Their assessment of the American soldier? Not very good. There is a low standard, many poorly educated, lower social classes, with poor discipline. Many of the Iraqis whose homes have been searched have been plundered, with money, jewelry etc. being taken. But on the other hand there have been moments of compassion. Apologies in some cases when they find that the families have suffered losses of children, etc. as a result of the bombing, etc. In some cases they suggest that the US army is made up of mercenaries. Foreigners there to get a green card --- some don't even speak english.. Others who find it the only permanent job they can get, albeit with risks.

Another interesting aspect: They say that the casualty and death toll for the US is higher than reported. They don't want the truth to be out that it is much higher than you hear. This of course will have a back lash on the upcoming elections.

Living conditions are atrocious. Electricity is sporadic in Baghdad, and practically nil in outlying areas. Many people have their own generators. In the repressive heat and humidity, Air Conditioning is a must, and without power-- unbearable. Women don't go on the street unless it is absolutely necessary. Rape and abduction is rampant. There is no law, no security.

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There was no ceremonial viewing of the body of Pfc. Raheen Tyson Heighter yesterday. His remains have not arrived here from Iraq. He was a spectacular 21-year-old who was killed when a convoy in which he was riding was attacked early in the morning outside of Baghdad.

His mother, Cathy Heighter, spent yesterday afternoon sitting with relatives in her mother's house, across the street from the Deer Park railroad station. She expects the body back next week. Then there will be a public viewing.

"I want to let people know he died for this country," the mother was saying. "He died an American hero."

"He was supposed to be home in June," one of the women in the living room said.

"Been there too long," an aunt, Barbara Adams, said.

"They wanted to come home," one of the others said.

"They've been there too long," Cathy Heighter said.

She is a pretty woman of 45. She wore a cream blouse and blue pants and sat on a living room couch underneath front windows. She has a respiratory ailment that causes her to cough persistently.

"The field commander called me," she was saying. "He talked so very highly of Raheen. He said the troops looked up to him. He fought to the end. He emptied his gun.

"I loved him," she said.

"He loved you," one of the women said.

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BAQUBAH, Iraq -- Sgt. Joey Torkildson recalled the day a grenade bounced off his friend's helmet. It was a dud. "It's crazy, but you just get used to stuff like that," he said.

Sgt. Michael O'Neill told of another grenade that rolled across the hood of his Humvee and exploded right next to him. Luckily, his hapless attacker had bought a concussion grenade, all noise and no explosives, so O'Neill lost his hearing instead of his life.

Days earlier, O'Neill said, he had watched a rocket-propelled grenade blast the fuel tanks of an armored personnel carrier directly in front of him in a convoy. He threw his Humvee into reverse to escape the flames, and a second RPG screamed across his hood, a few feet from his face, right where he had been a moment earlier.

"It's tough mentally," O'Neill said. "You never know where it's coming from. You could walk into the market and somebody could walk up to you and shoot you, and you'd never see it coming."

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A U.S. soldier driving to his base at Baghdad International Airport was killed when his armoured Humvee hit a landmine on Thursday.
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Earlier, Iraqi gunmen killed another U.S. soldier on a military base north of Baghdad. Two other Americans were wounded in that attack.

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There is a veneer of normality about life in the new Iraq. But America's failure to deliver on its promises has triggered a spiral of murderous anarchy that threatens to become an epic tragedy

By Robert Fisk
07/31/03: (The Independent) Paul Bremer's taste in clothes symbolises "the new Iraq" very well. He wears a business suit and combat boots. As the proconsul of Iraq, you might have thought he'd have more taste. But he is a famous "antiterrorism" expert who is supposed to be rebuilding the country with a vast army of international companies - most of them American, of course - and creating the first democracy in the Arab world. Since he seems to be a total failure at the "antiterrorist" game - 50 American soldiers killed in Iraq since President George Bush declared the war over is not exactly a blazing success - it is only fair to record that he is making a mess of the "reconstruction" bit as well.

In theory, the news is all great. Oil production is up to one million barrels a day; Baghdad airport is preparing to re-open; every university in Iraq is functioning again; the health services are recovering rapidly; and mobile phones have made their first appearance in Baghdad. There's an Iraqi Interim Council up and hobbling.

But there's a kind of looking-glass fantasy to all these announcements from the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the weasel-worded title with which the American-led occupation powers cloak their decidedly undemocratic and right-wing credentials. Take the oil production figures. Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, the US commander in Iraq, even chose to use these statistics in his "great day for Iraq" press conference last week, the one in which he triumphantly announced that 200 soldiers in Mosul had killed the sons of Saddam rather than take them prisoner. But Lt-Gen Sanchez was talking rubbish. Although oil production was indeed standing at 900,000 barrels per day in June (albeit 100,000bpd less than the Sanchez version), it fell this month to 750,000. The drop was caused by power cuts - which are going to continue for much of the year - and export smuggling. The result? Iraq, with the world's second-highest reserves of oil, is now importing fuel from other oil-producing countries to meet domestic demands.

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Diehard defenders of military intervention in Iraq argue that it's too soon to carp, that time is required to restore order and prosperity to a country ravaged by every type of misfortune.

Time, certainly, is needed, but is time enough? If the example of Afghanistan is anything to go by, time makes things worse rather than better. More than 18 months after the collapse of the Taliban regime, there is a remarkable consensus among aid workers, NGOs and UN officials that the situation is deteriorating.

There is a further point of consensus: that the deterioration is a direct consequence of "coalition" policy. Some 60 aid agencies have issued a joint statement pleading with the international community to deploy forces across Afghanistan to bring some order.

While waiting for the elusive international cavalry, they have been forced to reduce operations in the north, where the warlords fight each other, and in the south, where the "coalition" forces try to fight the Taliban.

Privately, many aid workers fear that it is too late. Even if the political will existed, foreign troops may no longer be in a position to restore order. To do so would require going to war with the warlords themselves.

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By ROBERT F. WORTH

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 2 — A homemade bomb exploded under a convoy this morning, killing two American soldiers and their interpreter, and a grenade attack Friday night left another American dead, military officials said today.

At least four other soldiers were wounded in the attacks.

In Friday night's attack, soldiers with the Fourth Infantry Division were struck by a rocket-propelled grenade about 10:30 p.m. while traveling in a convoy near the town of Shumayt, 40 miles north of the capital, said Specialist Nicole Thompson, a military spokeswoman in Baghdad. One soldier was killed and three were wounded.

Today, two soldiers and their interpreter were killed between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. when a homemade bomb exploded under their convoy on the outskirts of Baghdad, striking two Humvees, said Pfc. Jose Belen, with the First Armored Division.

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The south has been relatively free of the guerrilla attacks suffered by US forces in Baghdad. But is that all about to change?

By Robert Fisk in Basra
08/03/03: (The Independent) Beside the motorway north of Basra, two American soldiers lay dead, victims - like so many occupation soldiers in so many lands - of a mundane collision between military vehicles. An Apache helicopter had landed on the southbound carriageway to medevac their bodies from the baking desert while, amid the backed-up traffic, we stood beside our cars in the oven-like heat, watching this sudden tragedy afflict the all-powerful.

Some of the Iraqis had expressed their sympathy with the dead men - "Haram [it's a shame]," they said quite simply - but as the chopper's blades began to fight with the thick air, a US soldier approached us. He raised his left arm and gesticulated at the men to get into their cars, while with his other arm he pointed a gun at us. "How come you make this kind of gesture at me?" a young Iraqi said quietly, too far away for the American to hear. "We did not invite you here - and we are not in your country."

The anger was palpable as the Iraqis - obedient as any Palestinian confronted by an Israeli soldier in identical circumstances - climbed back into their cars, muttering their humiliation at each other. And you could understand why the British down in Basra - the incident occurred in their area of operations - want to put a large piece of desert between themselves and the Americans. Not by chance do they now refer to the area to the north, designated for a 2,000-strong Polish army, as a cordon sanitaire between the British 19th Brigade and the American 3rd Infantry Division.

For a strange and uncomfortable reality has made itself felt around Basra, where British troops have still largely avoided the ferocious guerrilla attacks now daily visited upon US forces around Baghdad. In Basra, where Lancashire accents cut through the heat at checkpoints -"Cool, cool," was the only reaction to my British passport as I was waved through - the alien accoutrements of the US occupation army, night-vision goggles, Tom Cruise shades and armadillo flak jackets, are largely absent. Instead of the American Humvees porcupined with rifle barrels, friendly old Land Rovers putter through the streets.

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''It has increased our hate against Americans,'' said Ali Hatem, 23, a computer science student at the University of Baghdad. ''It also increases the violence against them. In Iraq, we are tribal people. When someone loses their son, they want revenge.''

Neither Iraqis nor American forces keep statistics for dead civilians like Mohammed, whose shooting the US military calls a tragic accident. At least three Iraqis were killed in western Baghdad's elegant Mansour district on July 27, when US soldiers from Task Force 20 opened fire on cars that overshot a military cordon. The drivers apparently had missed the cordon when they turned into the area from an unblocked side street.

In late April, soldiers from the 82d Airborne Division shot dead 13 Iraqis when they opened fire on protesters in the town of Fallujah, about 50 miles west of Baghdad. Soldiers fired on another demonstration on June 18 at the gates of the Republican Palace in Baghdad, killing at least two people. In both those cases, US forces said they believed they were being fired upon by armed insurgents hidden in the crowd.

US officials have expressed regret that innocent people have been caught in the crossfire of the ongoing conflict.

''I'm working very hard to ensure that with our tactics we aren't alienating the Iraqi people,'' Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of US forces in Iraq, said Thursday. When asked whether officers had apologized to the families of five Iraqis killed during a botched raid in Mansour on July 27, Sanchez said, ''Apologies are not something that we have as a normal procedure in the military processes.''

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ABBANIYAH, Iraq -- Stripped of his uniform and laid flat on his back in a first-aid tent, a wounded Army engineer fixed his wide, unblinking eyes on a flimsy overhead tarp that shielded him from the desert sun.

Just minutes before, four shards of shrapnel had pierced the patient's right knee, groin, chest, and neck only 1 1/2 inches from a vital carotid artery. Now, 13 soldiers led by Lieutenant Timothy Coffman buzzed around the patient as they cleaned his wounds, washed his body, bandaged his neck, placed his leg in a splint, and injected 10 milligrams of morphine into his left thigh.

''OK, trooper, what's going on here? How you doing?'' asked Coffman, a 40-year-old physician assistant. ''Roll your palm into a fist if you can hear me.''

The patient, still in shock, curled his fingers toward the left palm, and Coffman gave him a pat of reassurance.

Three months after President Bush declared an end to major combat, the front lines of postwar Iraq are drawn in places like this, a sprawling dusty airfield built by the British Royal Air Force before World War II. Sixty miles west of Baghdad last week, the Colorado-based Third Armored Cavalry Regiment had just suffered its first casualty since moving a few days earlier to this former Iraqi air base in the dangerous Sunni Triangle. The engineer had not been wounded by hostile fire, but by a blasting cap from an Iraqi mortar that detonated while he was cleaning a building that his unit planned to use for housing.

''It's kind of a tenuous situation,'' Coffman said.

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BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 8 - A team of F.B.I. agents is being sent here to lead the investigation of Thursday's bomb attack outside the Jordanian embassy, American officials said today.

The death toll from the attack, by far the most lethal incident since the war's end, rose today to 17 from 11.

The decision to transfer authority to the Federal Bureau of Investigation from the Iraqi police and United States military was made by Bernard F. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner who has been leading the effort to retrain Iraq's police force.

``I think the Iraqi investigative ability is not capable of handling an investigation of this type,'' Mr. Kerik said. ``We need specialized assistance in the area of forensics, blast issues and explosives.''

The involvement of the F.B.I. appeared to underline the concerns of American officials that the attack represents the work of organized terrorists rather than the scattered strikes against American soldiers that have taken place almost daily here for months.

In the latest violence directed against American troops, a soldier with the 82nd Airborne Division was shot and killed today while on guard in the capital's Mansour district, a military spokesman in Baghdad said.

Six of those wounded in the embassy blast died of their injuries over the past day, hospital officials said, increasing the total to 17. The explosion killed five Iraqi police officers, Mr. Kerik said, amending initial reports that only four had died. No American soldiers or Jordanians were killed or wounded.

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One of the most surprising statements to come from The Power Hour interview conducted on “The Genesis Network” was that while the son, Josh Neusche, was a healthy young soldier on June 26, 2003, when he reported that he was going to serve on the secret hauling mission, by July 1, 2003, he was in a coma, and that day was suddenly classified by the military, as medically retired from the Army without Josh or his family’s consent. Josh did not die until July 12, 2003. Among other problems that this new classification created was that the DOD was no longer obligated to assist the family in getting to Germany to be with their son as he lay in a coma. Because the DOD would not provide even so much as plane or taxi fare for the Neusche family, all 650 members of the 203 Engineer Battalion each contributed $10.00 to make the family’s final visit possible.

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10 August 2003 (The Independent) The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.

"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."

The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."

But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.

Doctors said the father and his two daughters would have survived if they had received treatment quicker. Instead, they were left to bleed to death because the Americans refused to allow anyone to take them to hospital

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Published on Wednesday, July 23, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
by Steve Kretzmann and Jim Vallette

Operation Oily Immunity

During the initial assault on Baghdad, soldiers set up forward bases named Camp Shell and Camp Exxon. Those soldiers knew the score, even if the Pentagon's talking points dismissed any ties between Iraqi oil and their blood.

The Bush/Cheney administration has moved quickly to ensure US corporate control over Iraqi resources at least through the year 2007. The first part of the plan, created by the UN under US pressure is the Development Fund for Iraq which is being controlled by the US and advised by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The second is a recent Bush executive order that provides absolute legal protection for U.S. interests in Iraqi oil.

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An unprecedented internet campaign waged on the frontline and in the US is exposing the real risks for troops in Iraq. Paul Harris and Jonathan Franklin report on rising fears that the conflict is now a desert Vietnam

Sunday August 10, 2003
The Observer

Susan Schuman is angry. Her GI son is serving in the Iraqi town of Samarra, at the heart of the 'Sunni triangle', where American troops are killed with grim regularity.
Breaking the traditional silence of military families during time of war, Schuman knows what she wants - and who she blames for the danger to her son, Justin. 'I want them to bring our troops home. I am appalled at Bush's policies. He has got us into a terrible mess,' she said.

Schuman may just be the tip of an iceberg. She lives in Shelburne Falls, a small town in Massachusetts, and says all her neighbours support her view. 'I don't know anyone around here who disagrees with me,' she said.

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Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003

The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.

"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."

The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."

But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.

Doctors said the father and his two daughters would have survived if they had received treatment quicker. Instead, they were left to bleed to death because the Americans refused to allow anyone to take them to hospital.

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By Joseph Logan

BASRA, Iraq (Reuters) - A foreign security guard and two Iraqis were killed in a second day of violence in Basra on Sunday in which British troops fired warning shots as crowds attacked vehicles and blocked streets with burning tires.

The British patrolled in tanks as hundreds of stone-throwing Iraqis rampaged in protest against fuel and power shortages. In one incident troops said they returned fire from gunmen, but a tense calm settled over Iraq (news - web sites)'s second city by evening.

The violence was some of the worst in Iraq since Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) was toppled by U.S.-led forces on April 9 and occurred in a city at the heart of the mostly Shi'ite Muslim south, which has been relatively peaceful in the wake of his fall. Iraq's majority Shi'ites were repressed under Saddam, a Sunni Muslim.

The British blame oil smugglers, looters and saboteurs for the fuel and power shortages, but Basra residents are angry at seeing fridges and air conditioners stop working as summer temperatures soar to more than 120 Fahrenheit.

Southern Iraq's British-run administration said the security guard, a Nepalese Gurkha working for Global Security, was in a vehicle delivering mail for the United Nations (news - web sites) when he was killed by gunmen. Retired Gurkha soldiers from the British army are widely employed by security firms in Iraq.

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Sergeant Muhsen, 28, said one of his colleagues, Sergeant Mohammed Hilal Nahi, 30, was shot as he sat in the back seat of their white Hyundai car. It is the same make and colour as many other Iraqi police vehicles but did not have the force's blue markings and police numbering.

The third officer, Second Lieutenant Alaa Ali Saleh, 24, who was uniformed, was shot as he got out of the front passenger seat and held his hands in the air, holding his coalition-issued yellow police badge and shouting "police, police," said Muhsen.

"The second time he said it he was shot. He was hit by a machine gun that was firing at us right from the start of the incident," said Muhsen, who said the incident took place outside a cement factory on the Abu Gharib Road.

Muhsen, who said he was in civilian clothes but wearing the large police armband and wearing a yellow police badge, said after the firing had stopped he got out of the car and held his hands up.

"Three soldiers surrounded me. I got down on my knees, hands in the air, holding my badge," said Muhsen, speaking in his home in the Um al-Maalif district in southwestern Baghdad.

"One of them kicked me in the back and I fell to the ground. Another one kicked me twice in the face. They put their boots on my head and pressed it into the ground.

"I kept saying 'police, police.' I don't speak English but it's the same word in Arabic," said Muhsen, who said the beating lasted several minutes.

Muhsen showed AFP cuts to his nose and head, a black eye, and took off his shirt to display bruises over much of his back and on his chest.

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Mr. al-Sadr, a relative of two revered ayatollahs murdered by Mr. Hussein's government, is now getting his wish with the Mahdi force, which is named after a long-lost imam whose return is supposed to herald a new age. In Sadr City, where a billboard that used to feature Mr. Hussein greeting newcomers to the dilapidated area has been painted over with a Renaissance-like portrait of one of Mr. al-Sadr's famous relatives, devout Shiites who hang on his every word are signing up to form divisions.

The men are coming in droves to volunteer."

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From correspondents in Tikrit
August 12, 2003

HUGE explosions rocked a US military base west of Baghdad, several hours after US troops raided two sleepy villages where they suspected pro-Saddam Hussein guerillas were hiding.

US officials also announced the death of a US soldier, killed when assailants hurled a grenade at a police station he was protecting on Sunday night in the town of Baquba, 66km north-east of Baghdad. Two other soldiers were wounded in the attack, US Army Major Josslyn Aberle said.

At least 57 US soldiers have now been killed in guerilla-style attacks, while another 60 have died in non-combat incidents since the White House declared main combat operations in Iraq over on May 1.

No casualty toll was released after six powerful explosions shook a US military base in Ramadi, 100km west of Baghdad, last night as mysterious assailants fired on the compound.

An eyewitness, Faras Mustafa, 34, told AFP that he saw smoke rising from the base after the blasts.

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BAGHDAD -- As British troops Monday restored some electrical power and distributed gasoline in the riot-torn city of Basra, a U.S. soldier was killed and two others injured in a bomb attack in northern Iraq.

U.S. military officials also were criticized for a string of recent shootings of Iraqis, including two police officers who were killed by U.S. troops Saturday.

In one incident U.S. forces killed several Iraqi civilians Thursday evening, reportedly as they drove their vehicles in a darkened neighborhood in northern Baghdad. The troops apparently were conducting a raid at the time.

"The American forces have lost all control," said Raad al-Azzawi, whose 20-year-old son was killed in Thursday's shooting. "The American forces kill randomly without any reason."

Lt. Col. Guy Shields, a coalition spokesman, said the police shooting and the civilian deaths are under investigation by the U.S. military.

He said U.S. forces have taken "great strides" to avoid civilian casualties while calling each civilian death "a tragedy."

"There are incidents that have happened," Shields said. "We try to investigate those in hopes of minimizing them so that they don't happen again."

Ibrahim al-Jaafari, president of the Iraqi Governing Council, told reporters Monday that he was disturbed by the continued reports of U.S. troops firing on Iraqi civilians.

Al-Jaafari said most Iraqis are friendly to U.S. forces despite the fact that they are occupying the country. He said troops "must take more care" before using deadly force.

"We do not accept any victim," al-Jaafari said at a news conference. "The blood of our people is very dear to us."

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BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. soldiers shot into a crowd of thousands of demonstrators in a Baghdad slum on Wednesday, killing one civilian and wounding four after a rocket-propelled grenade was fired at them, the military said. North of Baghdad, guerrillas killed two American troops.

In Sadr City, a Shiite Muslim slum, about 3,000 demonstrators gathered around a telecommunications tower where they said American forces in a helicopter tried to tear down an Islamic banner. U.S. military spokesman Sgt. Danny Martin said it was apparently blown down by rotor wash from a helicopter.

However, amateur video footage obtained by Associated Press Television News showed a Black Hawk helicopter hovering a few feet from the top of the tower and apparently trying to tear down the banner. Later, U.S. Humvees drove by and the crowd threw stones at them. Heavy gunfire could be heard and demonstrators were seen diving to the ground.

Martin said U.S. forces opened fire after stones, gunfire and one rocket-propelled grenade were directed at soldiers of the 1st Armored Division. One civilian was killed and four were wounded, he said. He said no soldiers were hit.

Sadr City, formerly known as Saddam City, is a Shiite stronghold in the otherwise Sunni Muslim-dominated capital.

"We're peaceful people, but one edict (from the imams) and the entire American Army will become our prisoner," said Hassan Azab, a member of the local district council.

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British soldier has been killed and two others injured in an attack on a military ambulance in Basra.

The injured suffered non life-threatening injuries from flying shrapnel, an Army spokesman in the southern Iraq city said.

The green Army ambulance, emblazoned with Red Cross symbols, was hit by an explosive device hidden in earth next to a lamp post.

The home-made bomb was activated by remote control.

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Jonathan Steele

Friday August 15, 2003: (The Guardian) It was a warm spring evening in a Baghdad suburb when American troops stopped the car in which 11-year-old Sufian Abd al-Ghani was riding close to his home with his uncle and a neighbour. They were ordered out and told to lie face down on the road. Sufian's father heard the commotion and rushed out to find the soldiers pointing their rifles at his son and the others. Claiming the uncle had fired at them, they started beating the three captives with their rifle butts, according to the father.

A neighbour confirms that a shot had been fired, but it was part of a row between the Ghanis and another family. "In Iraq this is normal. Almost every household in Baghdad owns a weapon. One man was drunk. The Americans must have heard the shot as they were passing. It was not directed at them," says the neighbour, who prefers not to be named.

The American soldiers searched the Ghanis' house, but found nothing. For three hours Sufian was kept on the ground with the two adults. Then the Americans put hoods over their heads, tied their hands with tight plastic bracelets, and drove them away. "Why are you taking my son?" a desperate Abdullah Ghani pleaded. "Don't worry. As he's a child, we'll send him back in a couple of days," a Sergeant Stark assured him.

The three were driven off to Baghdad airport, where US forces have set up a makeshift prison in large tents. Around 500 Iraqis are held in miserable conditions, sleeping on the ground, with inadequate water rations and not enough blankets to go round, according to former detainees.

Sufian spent eight days in a tent with around 20 adults. They were given yellow packets of ready-to-eat meals, the standard US army fare, but no change of clothes. Then the hood went back on and Sufian was taken to the Salhiyeh detention centre for women and juveniles - a holding facility in a police station just outside Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace, which has become the headquarters of the coalition authority.

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The United States likes to think that all it confronts in Iraq are a few die-hard Saddamists. But Paul McGeough meets a new guerilla movement with growing popular support.

There's a knock on the door. Standing in the first-floor corridor of the Al Safeer Hotel are two men - Ahmed, a weapons dealer and group commander in the Iraqi resistance, and Haqi, one of his foot soldiers. They enter and take a seat on the sofa, edgy but full of bravado after what they claim was a successful strike against a US convoy in a rural area north of Baghdad.

They had agreed, after weeks of negotiation through a go-between, to talk about the resistance. Now they are here to recount the detail of their most recent offensive against the US occupation forces in Iraq.

Ahmed begins: "Yesterday we were told about the new movement of convoys, so we used a special car to take our RPG [rocket-propelled grenades] and guns up there. We struck at sunset, in an area surrounded by farms.

"We positioned ourselves as locals, just standing around. But as the convoy came into view we picked up the weapons which we had lying on the ground. There were 19 soldiers. I could see their faces. I fired three grenades - two at a truck and one at a Humvee. Then we escaped across the fields to a car that was waiting for us. It took just a few seconds because God makes it easy for us."

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Iraqi Clerics Unite in Rare Alliance
U.S. Fears Shiite, Sunni Cooperation Will Bolster Resistance

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 17, 2003; Page A01

NAJAF, Iraq, Aug. 16 -- A popular Sunni Muslim cleric has provided grass-roots and financial support to a leading anti-American Shiite cleric, a rare example of cooperation across Iraq's sectarian divide that has alarmed U.S. officials for its potential to bolster festering resistance to the American occupation, senior U.S. and Iraqi officials say.

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KABUL, Afghanistan - Hundreds of insurgents in a convoy of trucks attacked a police headquarters in southeastern Afghanistan (news - web sites), triggering a gunbattle Sunday that killed 22 people, officials said. It was one of the largest shows of anti-government force in over a year.

The fierce fighting in Paktika province was the latest in a wave of violence that has underscored just how unstable Afghanistan remains after U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban in late 2001.

The assault began shortly before midnight Saturday when about 400 guerrillas traveling in trucks drove across the border from Pakistan and attacked the police headquarters in the province's Barmal district, about 125 miles southeast of Kabul, said provincial Gov. Mohammed Ali Jalali. It wasn't clear how he knew the men came from Pakistan.

Firing rockets, heavy machine guns and grenades, the attackers easily took over the office. About 15 to 20 Afghan police were in the compound at the time and seven of them — including the district police chief — were killed, Jalali said. The rest, realizing they could put up little resistance, fled.

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Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets

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Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods — including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.

"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."

This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million — jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.

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http://www.ips.org/ I can't link to the article itself, so have had to copy it:

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Why I Attacked US Troops

Ferry Biedermann

BAGHDAD, Aug 15 (IPS) - The shy young man in the cafeteria of a Baghdad hotel hardly seems the type to carry out attacks on U.S. soldiers. But Walid (not his real name), a student of English Literature at Baghdad University, has a story to tell that is compelling and detailed. A fellow student confirms that the account tallies with what his friend told him at the time.

Walid says he belongs to a ”resistance group” in the area around his birthplace Fallujah, where many of the attacks on U.S. soldiers in Iraq have taken place.

Some two months ago he and five other fighters set out through a field towards a road along which they were informed a U.S. army convoy would be travelling. Walid carried an RPG-7 rocket launcher and two grenades. He wore a blue track suit. ”No, not because of camouflage, it is my favourite colour,” he says.

Once they arrived at the road, Walid and his five comrades spread out and waited for the convoy to arrive.

”We must resist anyone who insults our Arab tradition,” Walid says by way of justifying the attack.

On the day of the attack, ”a friend” came by to call him up about 9pm. Most of the others were informed via satellite telephone. Walid knew only two of his fellow fighters. They carried three RPGs and two mortars.

”I was anxious and worried about the outcome,” Walid says. He recalls lying in wait for about 90 minutes. ”I was not afraid to die,” he says. His main worry was that he would fail to hit his target, the last vehicle in the convoy.

When the five American Humvees and three or four Bradley fighting vehicles reached the spot of the ambush, Walid's fears proved well grounded. ”I missed and we had to call off the whole operation,” he says.

His RPG exploded against some rocks and the U.S. troops opened fire. The group scrambled to get away and Walid saw two of his comrades getting hit; he thinks they were wounded. He has not seen them again but he says he is sure everybody got away.

After the botched attack Walid was not called up again. He thinks that the group is observing a cease-fire. ”Many of the operations went bad, they caused problems for the people,” he says.

Walid had been called up for training with a group of other newcomers just four or five days before the June attack. He had never handled an RPG before but that day he fired two grenades ”in an open area.”

The group has plenty of weaponry and ammunition, says Walid. Besides the RPGs he talks about mortars and even anti-aircraft missiles, some of them bought from ex-army officers. ”We had a variety of weapons that were well- hidden after the war.”

Walid does not conform to the picture that has emerged over recent months of the typical new Iraqi guerrilla fighter. He dislikes the old regime, he is not a Muslim fundamentalist and he is not even unwaveringly anti-American. A fervent handball player, he has an athletic figure and huge calluses on his hands.

The handball player positively welcomed the demise of the old regime. Its minions had frustrated his dream of playing the game at the highest level when they demanded a bribe of 3 million Iraqi dinars, at the time 1500 dollars, to try out for the national team.

”Most people didn't respect the old regime, and don't want it back,” says Walid. That is why he thinks that the leaders of his resistance group are not Baathists or supporters of Saddam Hussein. But he is not entirely sure -- he has never met them. His friends in the resistance have told him they are ”good people”.

He offers up some generalities about why he personally dislikes the U.S. presence. ”They constantly pass by in their uniforms and with their weapons and they treat everybody badly, men and women,” he says.

Like many other Iraqis, Walid says he is particularly upset at the way some soldiers treat women during raids and searches. ”They touch women and grab them,” he says.

What finally seems to have turned Walid against the U.S. was a stint as a translator at a U.S. military base near Fallujah. As an undergraduate student of English literature, his language skills are supposed to be reasonable but in fact they are weak. He insisted on speaking Arabic throughout this interview.

When he recalls his time with the U.S. soldiers he grimaces, and bitterness fills his voice. ”They said we are non-believers, savages, that we have no right to live,” Walid says. He recalls that a sergeant said the Iraqis are ”unbelievable people” and that ”they can go to hell.” He lists every insult.

After three days Walid stopped going to the camp. He says the soldiers wanted him to come on patrol with them in their Humvees. ”That would have put me in a dangerous position.”

After quitting his job at the base he provided the resistance group with the identity of several Iraqi informers, ”traitors”, whom he had seen talking to the U.S. troops.

But he says also that the political situation has improved because of the appointment of the Iraqi Governing Council, a first step to re-establishing a full- fledged Iraqi government. In the meantime, says Walid, the group is using its time to build up its strength.

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[ 22 August 2003: Message edited by: al-Qa'bong ]

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08/21/03: It was always the same story. If it wasn't the enemy you were fighting, it was the enemy you knew you'd have to fight in the future.

So when the killers of Baghdad on Tuesday slaughtered 20 UN staff, with the UN's local proconsul, Sergio Vieira de Mello, the Americans embarked on one of their familiar flights into fancy. If it wasn't Saddam's "diehard remnants" who were tormenting them, it must be al-Qa'ida's "remnants" who are destroying America's best efforts to produce democracy in Iraq (though not Afghanistan); "foreign Arab" fighters were creeping over the border from Iran or Syria.

This was the line from the "Coalition Provisional Authority" yesterday: don't, for God's sake, produce proof of home-grown opposition, or the whole "liberation" of Iraq might look rather dodgy. Blame it on al-Qa'ida, on "Ansar al-Islam", on "terrorists" coming from Saudi Arabia or Syria or Afghanistan. But, during the war against the American invasion of Iraq, weren't there two suicide bombings in Nasariyah, one by a man, the second by two women? Weren't they Iraqis? And isn't it possible an Iraqi Sunni resistance movement - for let us be frank and accept that the Shia have not yet joined the resistance war, though they will - destroyed the UN headquarters on Tuesday? Only yesterday did it emerge that the bomber was probably a suicider.

Months ago, when Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary who in a previous incarnation pleaded with Saddam (circa 1983) to reopen the US embassy in Baghdad, arrived in the Iraqi capital to address his troops, he warned of "terrorist" organisations at large in Iraq. Some of us wondered what he was talking about. Hadn't the US just defeated Iraq?

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By Daniel Howden in Warsaw
21 August 2003

Poland scaled back its military commitment in Iraq yesterday in response to Tuesday's devastating attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad.

Under a hastily agreed new formula for the occupation, Polish troops will withdraw from a "high-risk area" near Baghdad, leaving the territory to come under the command of US forces, Polish Foreign Ministry officials revealed.

"We have ceded 1,000 square kilometres that would have come under the control of the Polish command to the US administration," Tadeusz Iwinski, a senior foreign policy adviser to the Polish Prime Minister, Leszek Miller, told The Independent.

Poland is due to take formal charge of the central third of occupied Iraq, sandwiched between the American and the British zones in the north and south, on 1 September.

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Three British soldiers have been killed and a fourth seriously wounded, after their vehicles came under attack in the southern Iraqi city of Basra.
The troops had been driving away from their base when, according to witnesses, gunmen in a pick-up truck opened fire and threw a grenade at them.

Those killed were all members of the Royal Military Police, the Ministry of Defence has confirmed.

The British Army in Basra said it was still trying to find out exactly what had happened and has launched an investigation.

Army spokesman Major Ian Poole said the mood among British troops following the attack was one of sadness mixed with determination.

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