The heaviest fighting for months erupted in the centre of Baghdad on Sunday, only a brief stroll from the office of the prime minister, Ayad Allawi. Witnesses said at least 13 Iraqis were killed and 55 wounded after United States helicopters attacked a crowd of unarmed demonstrators dancing round a burning Bradley armoured vehicle.
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, a Guardian journalist who writes a fortnightly column for G2 and contributes to the main paper, had stitches to his head after being injured in the violence.
One of those killed was the correspondent for the Arabic channel Al Arabiya, Mazen al-Tumeizi. Al Arabiya on Sunday broadcast videotape of the correspondent doing his report for the camera. Suddenly, an explosion occurred behind him and he doubled over.
A Reuters cameraman, Seif Fouad, recording the scene, was also wounded in the blast. ”I looked at the sky and saw a helicopter at very low altitude,” he told Reuters. ”Just moments later I saw a flash of light from the Apache, then a strong explosion. Mazen’s blood was on my camera and face,” Fouad said from his hospital bed. He added that his friend screamed: ”Seif, Seif! I’m going to die. I’m going to die.”
Sunday’s violence in the capital appeared to be a coordinated assault: resistance fighters lobbed dozens of mortars into the Green Zone, the fortified compound housing Allawi’s interim government and the US embassy. The crackle of gunfire echoed for several hours in central Baghdad. Insurgents then used a car bomb to attack an American patrol that went to investigate, and the US helicopters fired into the crowd.
Witnesses said the fighting in Haifa Street — a notoriously volatile area hostile to the US occupation — started at 3am.
”We don’t know whether it was the Americans or the Iraqis who started it,” Abu Adil said. ”Several mortars were fired at 7am and then a car bomb blew up the tank. After the tank exploded a helicopter started shooting at us. We all ran.”
In a statement last night, the US military said: ”As the helicopters flew over the burning Bradley they received small-arms fire from the insurgents in vicinity of the vehicle.”
Earlier, the US military had said a helicopter destroyed the vehicle ”to prevent looting and harm to the Iraqi people”, after four US soldiers were wounded in the attack on the Bradley.
Reports put the death toll across Iraq yesterday at between 60 and 100. The health ministry said the worst casualties were in the capital, where 37 were killed, and in Tal Afar, near the Syrian border, where 51 people died after US troops mounted a large offensive.
Three Polish soldiers died and three others were wounded in an ambush near the Iraqi city of Hilla. ”We’ve seen a tremendous increase in the number of attacks,” Brigadier General Erv Lessel, a US military spokesperson, told the Reuters news agency.
Tawhid and Jihad, a militant group linked to al-Qaeda and led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, said it carried out Sunday’s coordinated campaign of violence in Baghdad.
In an acknowledgement of the extent of the insurgency, which has led to loss of control of at least three towns, including Falluja, Allawi pledged at the weekend that the January election would go ahead even if some Iraqis could not vote.
He said: ”If for any reason 300 000 people cannot have an election, cannot vote because terrorists decide so, then frankly 300 000 people … is not going to alter 25 million people voting,” he said.
The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, acknowledged that the US-led coalition faced difficulties, but said the Bush administration was committed to making Iraq stable.
Allawi said Saddam Hussein was expected to go on trial before the end of the year, before the country’s first elections since the US invasion. He hoped the trial, which had not been expected until next year, would offer an olive branch to thousands of Ba’ath party members, and help draw the sting from an insurgency which shows no sign of abating.
He said that putting Saddam on trial would draw ”a line between those who committed crimes against the Iraqi people when Saddam was around and the rest who had to join the Ba’ath party to live, or believed in the ideology”.
Of those Ba’ath members who did not commit crimes, he added: ”We are not interested in pursuing them. They should be part of the civil society in Iraq, part of the political process in the future.”
Saddam, who was captured last December after eight months on the run, appeared in court in June to face initial charges of war crimes and mass executions. Court officials have said that drawing up evidence was taking time, but Allawi said his trial would now be ”most probably before the elections” due in January. Other former regime officials are expected to face trial first.
According to a report in the Sunday Times, Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s former foreign minister, has agreed to give evidence against the ousted dictator.
A British official in Baghdad said Allawi would pay his first official visit to Britain ”within weeks”. – Guardian Unlimited Â