Angry crowds denounced the United States as they mourned the victims on Thursday of a US air strike on an alleged militant safehouse in Fallujah that killed 20 people, including three children, and left a gaping, 6m-wide crater.
”There is only one god, Allah!” crowds chanted at the Fallujah General hospital where the bombing casualties were brought before dawn on Thursday. A blanket filled with body parts could be seen lying on the ground, while relatives loaded corpses on to the back of a pick-up truck for burial.
”It is because of the Americans,” one man shouted.
The US military said it had carried out a precision strike late on Wednesday on a safehouse in Fallujah, 65km west of Baghdad, used by followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant believed responsible for bombings, kidnappings and other violence in Iraq.
Witnesses said the strike hit a residential house in the southern neighbourhood of al-Jubail.
US forces have repeatedly carried out air strikes in Fallujah, west of Baghdad, since marines pulled back after a three-week siege of the city in April aimed at rooting out Sunni Muslim insurgents.
Crisis talks over captured journalists
Meanwhile, French envoys were planning to hold crisis talks on Thursday in Iraq and Jordan in a desperate bid to free two journalists seized by militants seeking to overturn France’s law banning Islamic headscarves in public schools.
A group of French Muslims was expected in Baghdad to try to pursue negotiations with the militant group holding the journalists. Representatives of the French Council for the Muslim Faith, which serves as a link to President Jacques Chirac’s government, left Paris on Wednesday in hopes of retrieving the journalists.
”I am against the presence of the Americans in Iraq, it is an occupying army, but if an American journalist was captured, my message would be the same,” said Abdallah Zekri, a member of the French Muslim council. ”The role of journalists is democracy. They inform us, they inform the entire world. Journalism is a profession that must be respected.”
The vigorous French efforts to secure the release of veteran Middle East reporters Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot came as a separate militant group released seven foreign truck drivers on Wednesday, whom they held hostage for six weeks, after receiving a $500 000 ransom payment.
Other violence
In other violence, two people were killed on Thursday in a roadside bomb explosion about 70km south-west of the northern city of Kirkuk, according to police Colonel Sarhat Qadir.
In downtown Baghdad, an insurgent threw a hand grenade at a passing police vehicle, injuring one officer and setting the car ablaze. US troops quickly arrived to put out the fire and secure the area.
West of the capital, US forces detained the mayor of Qaim, near the Syrian border, along with about two dozen council members during a raid on the city-hall offices, said police Captain Ahmed al-Ugaili.
The US military did not immediately comment on the raid.
Also on Thursday, about 100 Iraq policemen protested in front of the governor’s office in the northern city of Mosul, saying they had not received their salaries in five months.
Dressed in civilian clothes, some of the demonstrators sat on the street in front of the building. Others asked that the police chief resign.
”Where is our government? We want our salaries,” they chanted.
Kidnappers were ‘purely extortionists’
Militants waging a violent 16-month insurgency in Iraq have increasingly turned to kidnapping foreigners in the country as part of an effort to drive out coalition forces and contractors. Other groups have taken hostages in hopes of extorting ransom, sometimes masking their greed under a cloak of politics.
The group holding the seven truck drivers, which called itself ”The Holders of the Black Banners”, had demanded their employer stop working in Iraq, that Iraqi detainees be released and that compensation be paid for the victims of fighting in Fallujah.
By last week, they had dropped all the other demands and said they just wanted a commitment from the company, the Kuwait and Gulf Link Transport Company (KGL), to stop working in Iraq, which it soon received.
But after the seven men — one Egyptian, three Indians and three Kenyans — were released on Wednesday and whisked out of the country, the company gave a different version of events, saying the kidnappers had actually demanded $6,7-million in ransom.
In the end, a team of employees drove to an unspecified location where the drivers were held and paid $500 000 — an immense fortune in Iraq — to secure their release, KGL CEO Said Dashti said.
”They [the kidnappers] were not trying to make a political statement, they were purely extortionists,” he said.
The announcement that the men were freed sparked celebrations in their home countries.
”My joy today is as big as the whole world. I feel he is born again,” said Nadia al-Shanawani, mother of Egyptian hostage Mohammed Ali Sanad.
In a bizarre video given to news agencies soon after the release, the seven hostages are shown standing against a wall as a masked man shakes each man’s hand, hugs him and hands him a Qur’an, another Islamic book and what appears to be a CD or cassette.
”We warn all companies that work with the occupiers of the black destiny awaiting them in Iraq if they continue with this work,” a voiceover on the video says. — Sapa-AP
US air strike on Fallujah kills 20