The war in Iraq has claimed its first South African victim, media reports said on Sunday. The Beeld said Sholto Hedenskog, a Royal Marine who was born in Pretoria, was one of the 12 soldiers who were killed on Friday morning.

British and US military planners were conducting an urgent review of their ”friend or foe” identification procedures yesterday after a US Patriot missile battery shot down a Tornado over northern Kuwait: the first serious targeting mistake of the war.

A 29-year-old, middle-class man somewhere in the suburbs of the Iraqi capital has become one of the most intriguing stories on the internet.

US officials were last night investigating a large factory in southern Iraq, which reports suggested could have been used to make chemical weapons.

Yellow police boats sped over the muddy brown waters of the Tigris. Soldiers fired machine guns into clumps of reeds in a futile hunt for what they thought was a downed American pilot.

Yesterday morning, in the hot glare of midday, Ahmed Adel and his partners were embarking on a journey through Iraq more perilous, in its way, than any soldier’s march.

The appearance of US prisoners of war on Middle Eastern television came as a nasty morning shock to a nation that was unprepared for such reversals, and a clear omen that the battle for Iraq is not going to be as straightforward as some of the more optimistic hawks had predicted.

It ain’t so easy getting to Ouagadougou from Johannesburg. It would be nice if all these New Partnership for Africa’s Development and African Union initiatives paid less attention to providing our leaders with fancy aeroplanes and paid more attention to how ordinary natives from Africa can get from A to B on their own patch of ground.