In a daring dawn strike from point-blank range, anti-American forces unleashed a barrage of rockets yesterday against the Al Rasheed Hotel, a symbol of the US presence, killing one US soldier, injuring 15 other people and delivering another message of resistance to the US-led occupation of Iraq.
After the 6:10am attack, a shaken-looking Paul Wolfowitz, the visiting US deputy defense secretary, said the attack would not deter the US in its mission to transform Iraq.
Wolfowitz, on a three-day Iraq tour, was believed to have been in the Al Rasheed, whose western concrete face was left pockmarked with a half-dozen or more blast holes and shattered windows in two dozen rooms. The heaviest damage was on what appeared to be the fifth and eighth floors of the modern, 18-story building.
The attackers had boldly driven to the edge of a park just a half-kilometer southwest of the hotel, towing what looked like a portable, two-wheeled generator, Iraqi police said. They quickly fled, and rockets suddenly ignited within the trailer, apparently on a timer, and flashed toward the nearby hotel, their impact resounding across central Baghdad.
Three approaching security guards were injured by the ignition blast, police said.
A statement by the US command said one US soldier was killed. The 15 wounded included seven American civilians, four US military personnel and four "non-US coalition civilian partners."
After the attack, scores of American officials fled the building in pajamas and shorts, heading for a nearby convention center housing occupation offices, witnesses said.
Wolfowitz, expressing "profound sympathy" for the victims, said danger persists in Iraq "as long as there are criminals out there staging hit-and-run attacks."
Just a day earlier, and only hours after the deputy secretary left the 4th Infantry Division base at Tikrit, north of Baghdad, a division helicopter crash-landed after receiving ground fire from a rocket-propelled grenade near the base. The Black Hawk pilot managed to maintain control after the hit and crash-landed, said division spokeswoman Major Jossyln Aberle.
"We can confirm the helicopter took fire from an RPG while in the air," Aberle said yesterday.
She said the division quick response team managed to "detain two persons responsible for firing the RPG." They still had the launcher with them at the time of capture.
After the hotel attack, US troops flooded the area, closing off roads around the "green zone," an already heavily guarded district of central Baghdad that includes the palace headquarters of the US-led coalition and the offices of the interim Iraqi Governing Council. The morning clampdown caused monumental traffic jams.
The rockets were fired two hours after coalition authorities ended the nighttime curfew in the Iraqi capital in preparation for the Muslim holy month Ramadan, which begins here today. Officials cited improved security as the reason for ending the curfew.
An Iraqi police commander, who refused to give his name, said the attackers, in a white Chevrolet pickup, had driven down a main road passing a few hundred meters from the hotel and there stopped at the edge of the city's main Zawra Park and Zoo. Security guards of the new Facilities Protection Service spotted the activity.
"We approached him [the driver] to tell him to move the car. When he saw us, he fled," one of the injured guards, Jabbar Tarek, said at a nearby hospital.
As Tarek and others approached, the rockets fired off from the blue trailer, police said. Tarek said the guards weren't armed, or "I would have fired on him."
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