The top US commander in Iraq has issued a grim warning that violence is set to rise in the run-up to the handover of power to Iraqis from daily assaults on occupation forces.
The postwar US combat death toll hit 190 on Sunday when a soldier died in the northern city of Mosul from a roadside bomb which also injured two of his colleagues.
An anti-US insurgent was also blown up shortly afterwards when he tried to plant explosives on a main road in the center of Mosul, said police. He died after two Iraqi policemen were shot and wounded in another attack in the city.
US surveillance helicopters also killed an Iraqi insurgent on Saturday in the Ramadi area, 100km west of Baghdad.
Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez said on Sunday that the raging insurgency could be expected to intensify and the targets to widen right through June and July.
And a rebel tribal chief said that fugitive former president Saddam Hussein was personally directing the insurgency across one third of Iraq from hideouts west of the capital.
Sanchez vowed the coalition would eventually capture or kill Saddam, describing him as "the needle in the haystack" and "a hard problem."
"We expect to see an increase in violence as we move towards the transfer of sovereignty at the end of June," he said, predicting that anti-coalition forces would step up the fight to try to prevent the power transfer.
"By the time we pass sovereignty back to the Iraqi people those [enemy] forces will have to conduct some sort of operation against the political and economic sector while keeping pressure on the military to derail that process," he said.
At the same time, US-led forces would remain on an offensive, which generals have credited with halving attacks on their men, if only to see a surge in the killing of Iraqis.
"The only way you win in combat is to stay on the offensive. We will continue to do that but it will be an offensive that is based on intelligence, that is coordinated with the Iraqi people," said Sanchez.
Adding to the explosive situation, Newsweek magazine reported that the al-Qaeda terror network was shifting most of its operations to a new front in Iraq.
Three top emissaries of terror mastermind Osama bin Laden told associates of fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar last month of the plan, the weekly said in yesterday's edition.
The shift of the main theater of operation was ordered by bin Laden himself because he and his top lieutenants see a great opportunity for killing Americans and their allies in Iraq and neighboring countries such as Turkey, Newsweek said.
Bin Laden believes that Iraq is becoming the perfect battlefield to fight the "American crusaders" and that the Iraqi insurgency has been "100 percent successful so far," the report quoted a Taliban participant as saying.
General Sanchez also defended the growing use of Iraqi Civil Defense Corps personnel, many of them former militiamen, to back up the coalition military.
Sunni leaders have warned however of a descent into civil war if former Kurdish rebels or Iran-trained Shiite militants are deployed in Sunni areas.
"These units will conduct operations under the command and control of coalition forces. We will have our own liaison officers embedded," said Sanchez.
"We will have control of where they conduct operations and we see that continuing for some time," he said.
RSS