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.
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