United States efforts to stabilise Iraq ahead of next month’s transfer of sovereignty were dealt a huge blow on Monday when the head of Iraq’s US-appointed governing council was killed by a suicide car bomber.
Abdul Zahra Othman, a moderate Shia who had spent nearly 25 years in exile, was blown up while waiting at a US checkpoint in a suburban Baghdad street. Ten other Iraqis were killed in the blast, including Othman’s driver and bodyguards.
Othman, who used the name Izzadine Salim during the Saddam years, took over as rotating president of the governing council this month. He was the second and the most high-ranking of its members to be assassinated since last year’s invasion.
His death comes at a critical time for the US-led coalition, which appears increasingly clueless as to how to deal with the worsening insurgency in the crucial weeks before the transfer of limited powers on June 30 to an Iraqi caretaker government.
In another attack, revealed on Monday, a roadside bomb containing the sarin nerve agent exploded near an American military convoy. US sources said it was uncertain whether more such weapons were in the hands of insurgents.
Last night senior politicians in Britain and the US condemned Othman’s killing and insisted the process of handing Iraq back to self-rule would not be deflected.
Tony Blair told reporters in Turkey: ”We are not going to have any so-called quick exit, there will be no cutting and running in Iraq. We will continue until the job is done.”
The foreign secretary, Jack Straw, said in Brussels: ”What this shows is that the terrorists and insurgents in Iraq are trying to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power from the occupiers to the Iraqi people, and these terrorists are the enemies of the Iraqi people themselves.”
President Bush emphasised that the US would not be thrown off course. ”On June 30, the flag of a free Iraq will be raised, and Iraq’s new interim government will assume sovereign authority,” he said.
A previously unknown group, the Arab Resistance Movement, said it killed Othman, calling him a ”traitor and mercenary”.
Othman had been on his way to the regular Monday meeting of the Iraqi governing council inside the coalition’s headquarters when a battered Volkswagen Passat cut in front of his Land Cruiser and exploded, one of his drivers, Abdul Karim, told The Guardian.
”I saw the driver but only for a moment. He had dark skin and dark hair. He was alone in the car.”
Another witness, Saad al Mukhtar, said: ”We were inside the house. All our windows were blown in. I ran out. I saw three people burning in the fire. One of them was crawling on the ground.”
Othman was thrown out of his car by the blast. He died in hospital soon afterwards from head injuries.
A newspaper editor and writer, he was head of the Basra-based Islamic Dawa movement and had lived in exile in Iran until last year.
On Monday one of his closest friends and former colleagues, Jawad al-Maliki, said he had taken an uncompromising stand against both Saddam and political extremism.
”He stood for civilised Islam,” he told The Guardian. ”He was a gentle man.”
Breaking down in tears, he added: ”His son phoned me from Australia to ask what had happened. I had to tell him his father was dead. The US has not got a grip on security. They have no intelligence. They have no information. They just sit behind their tanks.”
Othman’s killing comes amid mounting evidence that Iraqis working inside the Coalition Provisional Authority as translators or policemen are passing on information to Iraq’s resistance. – Guardian Unlimited Â