Iraqi guerrillas killed a US soldier in a grenade attack south of Baghdad early yesterday morning, bringing the American death toll in 24 hours to five. The deaths came as the hunt for Saddam Hussein intensified in the Tikrit area and in the capital.
US special forces hunting him last night carried out a bloody raid on the Baghdad house of one of Iraq’s most powerful tribal leaders, Rabiah Muhammed, but failed to find the former president.
An American soldier at a nearby hospital said five bodies and at least eight wounded had been brought in from the scene of the raid in the wealthy al-Mansour district of the cap ital. An Iraqi policeman said all the dead had been in cars fired on by troops as they drove through the area. A boy in his early teens was among the dead.
”Today has been off the wall,” said a US soldier guarding the emergency ward of Yarmuk hospital.
In Tikrit, Saddam’s home town, American troops said they missed catching his security chief — and possibly Saddam himself — by a mere 24 hours earlier yesterday.
Troops stormed three farms near the town in simultaneous pre-dawn raids after receiving a tip that the ousted president’s new security chief was staying at one of the farm houses, said Lieutenant Colonel Col Steve Russell, who led the operation by the 4th Infantry Division.
The raids came as General Richard Myers, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, made an unannounced visit to Iraq to talk to local commanders about the rising casualty rate among US troops.
The upsurge in violence would not drive the Americans out of Iraq, he added. ”There are going to be challenges here for some time. The one thing I can tell you is that the coalition is here to stay. We have 19 countries with forces on the ground here trying to improve the situation, and 15 countries that are sending forces.”
Members of the Bush administration yesterday warned that, even if Saddam was killed or captured, the fighting would almost certainly continue. The deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, said on NBC’s Meet the Press that ”the transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time”.
A senior US general said Iraq was becoming a ”terrorist magnet” for foreign fighters seeking to attack Americans. Lieutenant General Gen Ricardo Sanchez, commander of US ground forces in Iraq, said: ”This is what I would call a terrorist magnet, where America, being present here in Iraq, creates a target of opportunity.”
The deaths of the five US servicemen, killed in three separate incidents, mean that 27 US troops have died in July, a higher rate than at the start of armed resistance, which mounted after President Bush declared on May 1 that major combat operations were over.
Forty-nine coalition troops have been killed in combat since then, as well as 55 in ”non-hostile incidents”, usually road crashes. But coalition officials continue to insist, ”we’ve defeated the enemy — now we’re picking off the last bits of it,” as a senior military spokesperson said yesterday.
After releasing pictures of the bodies of Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay, to convince Iraqis that they are dead, coalition authorities find themselves in a quandary: what to do with the bodies. Officials yesterday cast doubt that Sheikh Mahmoud Nada, a leader of Saddam’s tribe, had asked for the bodies so they could be buried according to Muslim rites.
Many Iraqis say it would have been better to mount a prolonged siege and capture the sons alive at the house in Mosul where they were holed up last Tuesday, so that they could be tried. By the same token they want Saddam given a public trial for atrocities that killed thousands.
Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain’s outgoing UN envoy, who is to become the UK ambassador in Baghdad in September, echoed this view yesterday. ”We have now got to get the father,” he told the BBC’s Breakfast with Frost. ”I would like to see him brought before a court.”
The worst incident in the latest spate of attacks on Americans came on Saturday when a grenade was thrown at three soldiers guarding a children’s hospital in Baquba, north of Baghdad. A fourth soldier was killed in an attack on a convoy on the capital’s outskirts. – Guardian Unlimited Â