Aid groups set to quit Iraq after abductions
A co-ordinator for foreign aid groups said he expected most of the remaining 50 or so organisations to pull out following the kidnapping of Simona Pari and Simona Torretta, who were in Iraq to help child victims of war, from their Baghdad office on Tuesday.
Aid groups met to discuss the issue yesterday but broke off the meeting early for security reasons. Jean-Dominique Bunel, a French aid worker, said all organisations were reviewing their security and considering withdrawing.
The Pentagon, meanwhile announced that the death toll in Iraq had topped 1,000, equivalent to around two deaths a day since US-led forces invaded Iraq in March 2003.
The politically sensitive benchmark of 1,000 US deaths, which could play a role in the US presidential campaign, was surpassed after a surge of fighting in Muslim Sunni areas and Shi’ite enclaves.
In May last year, President George W Bush declared major combat operations over. Since then, more than 800 US soldiers have been killed in action.
Independent analysts estimate more than 10,000 Iraqis have been killed since the war was launched.
One US soldier was killed yesterday and another wounded in a convoy attack north of Baghdad, the US military said, and another soldier was killed and two wounded in a roadside bomb blast in the east of the capital.
Meanwhile, US jets struck a suspected militant stronghold used to plan attacks on American forces, the military said. Hospital officials said at least six people were killed and 11 wounded since the strikes began late Tuesday.
Residents huddled in their homes as planes repeatedly swooped over eastern and southern neighbourhoods of Fallujah, a hotbed of Sunni insurgents, witnesses said.
In other violence, gunmen kidnapped the Anbar province’s deputy governor yesterday in the latest assault on officials connected to Iraq’s interim government.
Amid the widespread fighting, Iraq’s interim government, which took office from the US administration two months ago, is also grappling with a widening hostage crisis.
In one of the most chilling abductions, the two Italian aid workers, both aged 29, and two Iraqis were snatched in broad daylight in central Baghdad on Tuesday.
Witnesses said 20 armed men stopped vehicles in a busy commercial area of the capital and raided a building housing the humanitarian organisation Bridge to Baghdad.
Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi joined opposition leaders to call for a unified response to the abduction and Pope John Paul II prayed for the aid workers’ release at the Vatican.
In a report to the UN Security Council in New York, Secretary General Kofi Annan said security in Iraq had not improved much since the US-led invasion.
“In addition to severely disrupting everyday life for Iraqis, the ongoing violence could undermine confidence in the transitional political process, making it more difficult to create the conditions necessary for the holding of elections in January 2005,” he said.
