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Mortar attack kills 3 US soldiers

An Iraqi policeman arrests a looter in central Baghdad on Saturday. PHOTO: REUTERS

Three American soldiers were killed and 13 injured in a mortar attack and a bombing in the volatile region of central Iraq, the US military reported yesterday. The deaths followed an assassination attempt against a member of Iraq's Governing Council.

Two soldiers from the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade died and 13 were wounded when two mortars hit an Army encampment at the Abu Ghraib prison on the western outskirts of Baghdad about 9:54pm Saturday. Thirteen soldiers were injured in the attack. No prisoners were injured.

Shortly before the Abu Ghraib shelling, a soldier from the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment was killed when his Humvee was hit by a roadside bomb near Ramadi, about 100km west of the capital, the military said.

The deaths brought to 165 the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq since May 1 when President George W. Bush declared major fighting was over. During the heavy fighting before then 138 soldiers died. The latest deaths brought to 302 the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq.

The latest American deaths followed an assassination attempt Saturday against Aquila al-Hashimi, one of three women on the 25-member Governing Council and strong candidate to become Iraq's representative at the UN. Al-Hashimi, a Shiite Muslim and career diplomat, was seriously wounded by six gunmen in a pickup truck who chased her in her car on Saturday. The assailants escaped.

Al-Hashimi underwent a second operation and was in stable condition at a military hospital on the grounds of one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces where the Coalition Provisional Authority has its headquarters, an official with the US-led civilian administration said yesterday.

She had been preparing to leave for a key UN General Assembly meeting in New York on Tuesday. Major US allies are pressing for Washington to give the UN a greater role in bringing stability to this fractured country.

The Governing Council president, Ahmad Chalabi, blamed Saddam loyalists for the shooting.

Yesterday, Douglas Brand, a British adviser to the Iraqi police, said the coalition officials were helping Iraqi police with the investigation and appealed to the public to come forward with any information.

"This was a cowardly attack," Brand told reporters. "She has undergone two operations. She remains in critical but stable condition at the hospital."

Meanwhile, Bush heads to the UN this week to demand that the world body shoulder a broader role in Iraq a year after he all but declared the UN irrelevant.

"Members of the United Nations now have an opportunity, and the responsibility, to assume a broader role in assuring that Iraq becomes a free and democratic nation," he said in a rare speech to the nation Sept. 7.

Bush will be addressing the UN General Assembly tomorrow morning in hopes of winning support for a new US-backed resolution aimed at drawing troops and money to Iraq even from nations that opposed the war.

Last year, he used the annual gathering to demand that the UN endorse military action to topple Saddam, warning that failure to do so would reduce the world body to "a debating society."

US officials say they hope this time to avoid the kind of diplomatic bloodbath that ended with France, Germany and Russia defeating US efforts to win explicit UN Security Council authorization for the March invasion.

Bush is to meet with French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in New York and will host Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Camp David presidential retreat outside Washington on Sept. 26 and Sept. 27.

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