Insurgents attack US headquarters in Baghdad

Attackers fired mortars toward the US headquarters in Baghdad as Washington’s top soldier in Iraq said insurgents have changed tactics to inflict more damage and casualties on coalition troops while reducing their own.

The Coalition Provisional Authority said the mortar attacks late yesterday caused no damage to the headquarters, located in the Republican Palace. After one detonation, white smoke could be seen rising from an area just north of the palace.

Meanwhile, the top US administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, abruptly departed for Washington, amid growing frustration over the inability to halt the attacks on troops and the slow process of turning power over to the Iraqis.

Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez said his soldiers will try to balance between the use of massive firepower and the need to win the goodwill of Iraqis. Attacks on coalition forces, he said, now average 30 to 35 a day, twice the number two months ago.

“I think we have got to be realistic,” he said when asked if the insurgency was worsening. “The enemy has evolved its tactics. They use mortars and rockets so as not to engage our forces.”

He said US forces intended to “get pretty tough” against the insurgency.

“The stark reality is that, militarily, they cannot defeat us, and they know it, and I remain supremely confident in this reality,” he said. “On the near term, given the focus we have on our offensive operations, and given the level of engagements that the enemy has chosen to move to … we are going to have more attacks here in the next 30 to 60 days.”

Some military experts warned that use of overwhelming firepower against the resistance may prove deadly for civilians at a time when Washington is trying to gain favour among Iraqis.

Between 21,000 and 55,000 people have died as a direct result of the war in Iraq, most of them Iraqi soldiers and civilians, a report estimated yesterday. Medact, an activist group of health professionals, said it had derived the “tentative” figures by adding numbers it obtained from news reports and by the Iraq Body Count Web site that estimates the number of Iraqi civilian deaths by tracking all those reported in the media.

US soldiers have been killed an average of one every 36 hours since US President George W Bush declared an end to major combat operations on May 1. The insurgency is centred west and north of Baghdad, an area known as the “Sunni Triangle”.

In Samara, 60 miles north of Baghdad, some Iraqis complained that insurgents were launching attacks from residential areas, and that the US response kills and injures innocent civilians.

“It’s everyone’s right to resist the occupation, but they shouldn’t attack from residential areas, from between houses,” said Qahtan Karam, a Kurd whose mother was killed and whose wife was seriously wounded in an exchange of fire on October 24 in Samara.

General Sanchez also said he believed about 200 foreign fighters were active in the country, in many cases cooperating with local insurgents, and that the military at one time held about 20 suspects believed linked to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida network.

“But as we have continued to refine and interrogate, we have not been able to establish definitively that they were al Qaida members,” he said. Foreign fighters, he said, were using two routes across the Syrian border and one from Iran to enter Iraq.

In Washington, Mr Bush’s national security advisers questioned Mr Bremer yesterday about how to break a political logjam in Baghdad and speed planning for the nation’s political future.

Mr Bremer’s surprise return to Washington comes at a time of increasing tension between coalition officials and the US-appointed Iraqi leadership, the Governing Council. Mr Bremer wants to delay transferring sovereignty until the Iraqis draft a constitution and hold national elections.

He attended the White House meeting with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and other key officials.

The Iraqis have yet to agree on how to choose delegates to draw up a constitution. Some coalition officials suspect the Iraqis are stalling in hopes that Mr Bremer will quickly give them more power.

Some Iraqi council members are also pushing for an Iraqi-controlled paramilitary force to fight the insurgents, something Mr Bremer opposes without coalition oversight and control.