The top US military commander in the Middle East narrowly escaped a rocket attack in Iraq on Thursday, while a UN team steered a middle course on demands by the country's Shiite Muslim majority for early elections.
And the US military said Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a man with a US$10 million price on his head, is the prime suspect in deadly bombings of the holy city of Najaf and the UN headquarters in Baghdad.
On Thursday, a convoy carrying General John Abizaid, head of US Central Command, and Major General Charles Swannack, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, was targeted with rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) as it travelled through Fallujah, 50km west of the capital.
PHOTO: AFP
"Three rocket-propelled gre-nades were fired at their convoy from the rooftops in the vicinity," US Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy coalition operations chief, told a press conference.
The attack was the second against a high-ranking US official in Iraq since major combat was declared over on May 1 last year.
US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz escaped a rocket attack on his hotel during a visit to Baghdad in October.
"No soldiers or civilians were injured and both coalition and Iraqi Civil Defence soldiers returned fire and pursued the attackers," Kimmitt said. "A local mosque was thought to be harboring the attackers, and Iraqi Civil Defence soldiers conducted a search of the mosque without result."
In Fallujah, Iraqi police Lieutenant Omar Duleimi said two Iraqi men were killed shortly after the attack, but it was not clear whether they had been involved.
Duleimi said US soldiers opened fire on the two, who were in a car, after they shifted quickly into reverse and screeched away from a US military checkpoint.
Earlier, the US military said two US soldiers had been killed and four others wounded in two attacks in Baghdad.
Kimmitt said Zarqawi, the suspected al-Qaeda operative, was "the most capable terrorist in Iraq" with a network of contacts throughout Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
He was, said Kimmit, the "prime suspect" in August's bombing in the southern town of Najaf that killed 83 people, including top Shiite Muslim politician Ayatollah Mohammad Baqer al-Hakim.
Zarqawi was also linked to the August attack on the UN headquarters here that killed the world body's special representative to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and 22 other UN workers, and prompted the UN to pull its entire staff out of Iraq.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said Thursday the environment in Iraq was still not yet ready for a return.
"We need to have a secure environment to be able to go back, and I'm not sure we have it yet," Annan said, adding that two suicide bombs that killed more than 100 in Iraq this week were "not encouraging."
In a 17-page letter released by the coalition attributed to Zarqawi, the author admits to participating in 25 operations in Iraq.
Kimmitt said the letter was seized in January following the arrest of a senior al-Qaeda facilitator and that it had been authenticated by independent intelligence reports.
Coalition spokesman Dan Senor said the hunt to kill or capture Zarqawi was "as elaborate and as widespread" as the one for ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and his two sons Uday and Qusay.
US troops captured Saddam on Dec. 13 as he was hiding in a hole on a farm near his hometown of Tikrit in northern Iraq. His sons were shot dead in July in a blistering battle with US troops.
"We will ensure that every Iraqi is intimately familiar with (Zarqawi's) blueprint for terror ... and his efforts to tear this country apart and turn it into an ethnic blood bath," Senor said.
The US military on Wednesday doubled its reward to 10 million dollars for information leading to Zarqawi's capture.
In the memo, Zarqawi "clearly calls for unleashing civil war" between Iraq's majority Shiite community and the unseated Sunni political and military elite which backed Saddam, Senor said.
Meanwhile Thursday, in the southern Shiite holy city of Najaf, a top UN official probing the feasibility of early elections agreed with Iraq's top Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani that polls should be held, but added that they must be well-prepared and held at the appropriate time.
Lakhdar Brahimi said he had met for two hours with Sistani at his home in Najaf.
Lakhdar's position appeared mid-way between that of Sistani, who wants direct elections before a June 30 transfer of power to an Iraqi authority, and the US-led coalition, which argues that free and fair elections cannot be held in such a short period but need preparation.
In Washington, US President George W. Bush named the final two members of the nine-person commission looking into flawed pre-war intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
Bush tapped the outgoing president of the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Charles Vest, and Henry Rowen, professor emeritus at Stanford University Business School, the White House said in a statement.
The panel is to submit its report by March 31, 2005 -- well after the November presidential election.
In London, NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said the Atlantic alliance was willing to assist security efforts in Iraq, but that nothing could happen until the country becomes self-governing.
"Priority number one at the moment is Afghanistan," where NATO troops are already deployed, Scheffer told a press conference.
"What kind of role NATO can play and will play in Iraq is very much dependent on political developments there," he said after meeting with British Foreign Minister Jack Straw and Defence Minister Geoff Hoon.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to