Iraq resistance ongoing as Bremer attack revealed

A HUGE explosion destroyed the offices of a major Shi’ite party yesterday as it was revealed that US administrator Paul Bremer escaped a rebel ambush on his convoy two weeks ago.

Also yesterday, a roadside bomb exploded near an American military truck outside Baghdad, wounding two soldiers, the military said.

Nobody was injured in the attack on Bremer’s convoy on December 6, the same day as a visit by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a spokesman said.

Bremer was riding in an armoured car near the Baghdad airport when a roadside bomb exploded and guerrillas attacked with small arms fire, but his convoy sped away, said Dan Senor.

“As you can see, it didn’t succeed,” Bremer told reporters yesterday in Basra. The attack was not believed to have been a planned assassination attempt on Bremer but merely another in a series of strikes against American convoys on that heavily-travelled road near the airport.

Bremer has not curtailed his schedule of touring Iraq since then, and he travelled to the southern city of Basra yesterday, Mr Senor said.

Yesterday’s pre-dawn attack on the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution Party office, which also wounded five others, came a day after Shi’ites buried a senior party politician assassinated on Wednesday as he left his home in Baghdad.

Party officials blamed both attacks on loyalists of Saddam Hussein, who was captured by US forces on Saturday.

Rahim Jabar, who lives in the building in western Baghdad, said his sister was killed and five other residents were wounded in the explosion, which brought down half of a one-story residential building that also housed a party branch office.

The blast that wounded the two American soldiers was caused by a homemade bomb, said Captain Tammy Galloway of the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division.

The tanker truck blew up about 7:50am, near Abu Ghraib, about 20 miles west of Baghdad, sending flames and clouds of smoke rising from the wreckage.

One witness, 19-year-old Jassim Mohammed, said he saw the bodies of two Iraqis in a civilian car.

On Thursday, the military reported that rebels had killed a US soldier in the first fatal ambush for the American military since Saddam’s capture.

The soldier was killed late Wednesday when a 1st Armoured Division patrol came under fire in north-west Baghdad, the military said. A second soldier and an Iraqi interpreter were wounded.

According to official reports, 314 US soldiers have been killed in combat since the war began on March 20, including 199 since President Bush declared the end of major combat on May 1. Another 144 soldiers have died in non-hostile incidents, according to the Pentagon.

Around 140 US soldiers from the 3rd Brigade of the 82nd Airbourne Division also raided a middle-class neighbourhood near Baghdad’s airport overnight and arrested five of seven suspected guerrillas, the military said on Friday.

They included a suspected bomb maker, said the raid commander, Capt Joel Kostelac.

Several attacks on US forces and Iraqi police in recent days have claimed more than a dozen lives in Baghdad and in predominantly Sunni areas west and north of the capital, once Saddam’s power base.

US forces also have conducted major operations in Samarra, a focus of guerrilla resistance 60 miles north of Baghdad, since Saddam was captured.

In New York, a member of Iraq’s Governing Council welcomed UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s call to discuss the UN’s role in Iraq, saying its legal expertise would help the transition to Iraqi sovereignty.

Annan said he wants the key players in Iraq, including the US-appointed council and the coalition, to meet on January 15 and decide exactly what role they want the United Nations to play as the country moves from US occupation toward self-government.

Meanwhile, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Fedotov said the fate of Russian companies and economic interests in Iraq will affect Moscow’s position in talks on relieving Baghdad’s massive international debt burden.

His comments came a day after President Vladimir Putin told US envoy James Baker that Russia is willing to start negotiations on relieving Iraq’s $8 billion in debt to Moscow, its largest creditor.

While the debt talks and the participation of Russian companies in postwar Iraq are separate issues, “progress in settling one of them will undoubtedly help success in the other,” Fedotov said.