Responsibility for the internal security of Iraq should be handed over to Iraqis as soon as possible, a key member of the Iraqi governing council urged yesterday.
Dr Mahmoud Osman, one of the six most prominent members of the US appointed body, said: ”The coalition should leave these things to Iraqis, we could do a much better job.
”If we don’t act soon more and more innocent Iraqis will die, more American soldiers will be hit, and the terrorists and pro-Saddam people will have achieved their goal of disseminating fear and panic.”
A joint security committee, which includes governing council members as well as the US chief administrator, Paul Bremer; Lt Col Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of US ground forces in Iraq; and Tony Blair’s special envoy to Iraq, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, will meet within the next few days to hammer out a joint policy on the deteriorating security situation in the country.
Osman said the plans call for the country’s police to be given ”a bigger budget, more manpower and more technology and weapons”; a strengthening of the civil defence force to protect Iraq’s key infrastructure sites; turning more of the party militias into regular forces; and recalling former Iraqi army officers who were neither involved in war crimes nor senior members of the Ba’ath party.
Osman suggested that leaders of the the country’s regional factions could also be brought into the security process.
Sheikh Ali Mohammed al-Abbassy, who heads the million-strong Beni Hassan faction in the areas south of Baghdad, said he and other leaders would ”impose order” if given the authority. ”We are just waiting for the word,” he said.
Meanwhile, the ambushes, assassinations, and car bombings in Iraq showed no sign of abating yesterday. A car bomb exploded in front of a power station in Falluja, killing at least four people, two of them children, and injuring six. In Baghdad, a rocket-propelled grenade killed a US soldier and wounded six others, and in Basra, a British soldier was injured by a roadside bomb.
Last night up to five explosions were heard close to Baghdad’s Jadriyah district. A coalition military spokesperson said they had received reports of mortars or rockets being fired ”somewhere to the west of Baghdad university”.
Helicopters had conducted a search, but there were no reports of casualties.
”We’re still trying to identify the impact site,” the spokesperson said.
In Mosul, an Iraqi newspaper editor, Ahmed Shawkat, who had written articles criticising radical Islamists, was shot and killed while making a phone call from the roof of his office building.
It was also reported that the deputy mayor of Baghdad, Faris al-Assam, had been killed in a drive-by shooting near his home on Sunday.
In Washington, George Bush warned Iran and Syria not to let militants cross into Iraq from their territory.
”We are working closely with those countries to let them know we expect them to enforce borders,” the president said.
A suspected Syrian man was shot and captured while trying to blow up a police station in eastern Baghdad on Monday, when the capital was rocked by a string of suicide car bombs that left 34 Iraqis and two US soldiers dead and 264 people wounded.
Despite intelligence reports yesterday that the US has just six months before the resistance will be too widespread to contain, Bush insisted that the bombers had been driven to desperation by American success in Iraq.
”These terrorists are targeting the very success and freedom we’re providing to the Iraqi people. Basically what they are trying to do is cause people to run,” Bush said.
The apparently well-coordinated bombings, which came at the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, caused fear and anger in the Iraqi capital. Blame was laid at the door of foreign insurgents, diehard Saddam loyalists, or a combination of both.
It is uncertain how much authority the US-led administration in Iraq will be prepared to cede. Coalition forces are wary of measures that might strengthen the hand of local militias or create tension among Iraq’s ethnic and religious communities. – Guardian Unlimited Â