Four people were killed in bomb attacks in Iraq on Thursday and United States forces shelled rebel holdouts in the restive city of Fallujah, as differences over Iraq moved back into the spotlight at an Anglo-French summit.
As US and Iraqi forces still battled to crush Sunni Muslim insurgents, the world voiced outrage over the suspected murder of British aid worker Margaret Hassan by her kidnappers.
French President Jacques Chirac visits Britain on Thursday, with Iraq a sore point after the man who led European opposition to the US-led war said he is not convinced that the world has become safer since the downfall of Saddam Hussein.
Differences over Iraq are also likely to emerge at this weekend’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit in Chile where US President George Bush, on his first trip abroad since winning re-election, will seek support for his policies.
More deadly violence shook Iraq after a day that saw more than 20 people killed in fighting and a bomb attack in Sunni Muslim hotspots.
Early on Thursday, two Iraqis were killed in a car bombing outside a police station in Baghdad and another two were killed in an explosion in the northern oil centre of Kirkuk.
Meanwhile, the US became the latest nation to condemn the apparent murder of Hassan, the head of Care International’s Iraq operations who was seized by unknown attackers on October 19 while on her way to work.
”We strongly condemn the abduction and murder of this prominent humanitarian,” White House spokesperson Scott McClellan said in a statement. ”Her death is a great loss to the Iraqi people and the world.”
If her death is confirmed, she is believed to be the first foreign female hostage to have been murdered in Iraq, and the second British hostage.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard backed away from an earlier statement in Parliament that the mutilated body of a woman found in Fallujah earlier this week appeared to be that of Hassan.
Howard did say there was every indication that Hassan was the woman who appeared in a video received by Al-Jazeera on Tuesday, showing an armed man shooting a blindfolded woman in the head.
The body of a blonde-haired woman with her legs and arms cut off and throat slit was found on Sunday lying on a street in Fallujah. It has not been identified.
US-led troops engaged in sporadic battles against rebels in Fallujah after launching a major assault to wrest the Sunni-Muslim stronghold west of Baghdad away from insurgents 10 days ago.
Shelling continued on the southern outskirts of Fallujah on Thursday, an AFP photographer said, adding that Iraqi volunteers and US troops were collecting the scores of corpses littering the battered city.
A US marine officer said on Wednesday the ”the battle is over” in Fallujah, although there are still small pockets of rebels that need to be crushed.
But violence has erupted elsewhere in Iraq, as the military continued its bid to clear rebels from the northern city of Mosul and at least 23 people were killed in clashes and attacks in other cities.
Fourteen people were killed, most of them women and children, and 26 wounded in a bomb explosion and clashes in the town of Baiji, north of Baghdad, police said.
Another nine were killed and 15 wounded in clashes in Ramadi, just west of Fallujah.
In western Iraq, more than 60 police officers were seized on Sunday as they returned from training in Jordan, one of only two men who managed to escape the ambush said on Wednesday.
”We were around 65 policemen returning from training in Jordan when around 20 masked gunmen entered our hotel on Sunday morning in Trebil,” Leith Naama al-Kaabi said.
”They hooded all the policemen, tied their hands and took them away,” he said.
Iraq’s security forces are the target of almost daily attacks by insurgents across the war-torn country, with dozens killed in recent months.
Meanwhile, Chirac begins a two-day visit to Britain for an annual Anglo-French summit, with Iraq again a top issue after he said the world is more dangerous since Saddam was toppled in April last year.
”There’s no doubt that there has been an increase in terrorism and one of the origins of that has been the situation in Iraq. I am not at all sure that one can say that the world is safer.”
British Prime Minister Tony Blair is Bush’s staunchest ally on Iraq and the US’s ”war on terror”, issues also set to top the agenda at the Apec summit in Chile, which opens on Saturday.
”No one opposes a fight against terrorism, but once talks turn to the Iraq war, voices remain divided sharply,” said Kazuro Umezu, former professor of international politics and Asian studies at Nagoya-Gakuin University in Japan.
”Opposition to the US-led war obviously became bigger in a lot of Apec members than last year,” he said. — Sapa-AFP