RBS
April-11th-2003, 11:23 AM
From MSNBC:
Despite military gains throughout Iraq, U.S. forces grappled with rising chaos and violence Friday as widespread looting underscored deep poverty and the lapse of police authority. The brutal murder of two Shiite religious leaders laid bare the deep religious and ethnic divides, while the killing of two children at a checkpoint in Nasiriyah and a suicide bomb attack on Marines at a checkpoint in Baghdad served as grim reminders of the lingering threat from Iraqis still loyal to Saddam Hussein and the tension under which coalition forces are operating.
THE HOLY CITY of Najaf was the site of one of the grisliest events Thursday when a crowd rushed two Islamic clerics and hacked them to death, witnesses said, at a meeting meant to serve as a model for reconciliation in post-Saddam Iraq. Despite allegations that loyalists to Saddam were responsible, the motive for the killings remained a mystery.
“People attacked and killed both of them inside the mosque,” said Ali Assayid Haider, a mullah who traveled from the southern city of Basra for the meeting.
The accounts could not be independently confirmed.
The killings of the clerics, Haider al-Kadar and Abdul Majid al-Khoei, took place at the shrine of Imam Ali, one of the holiest sites of Shiite Islam, which is practiced by the majority of Iraqis.
Witnesses told reporters that a meeting was held at 10 a.m. (2 a.m. ET) among leading mullahs about how to control the shrine, which has been under the supervision of al-Kadar, who was widely disliked because of his role as a member of Saddam’s Religion Ministry.
In a gesture of reconciliation, al-Kadar was accompanied by al-Khoei, son of one of the religion’s most prominent ayatollahs and himself a high-ranking Shiite cleric.
When the two men appeared at the shrine, members of another faction loyal to a different mullah, Mohammed Braga al-Saddar, verbally assailed al-Kadar.
Apparently feeling threatened, al-Khoei pulled a gun and fired one or two shots. Accounts conflicted over whether he fired into the air or into the crowd.
The crowd rushed both men and hacked them to death with swords and knives. An unknown number of people were injured.
GRIM REMINDERS
U.S. Marines said they killed two children at a checkpoint in Nasiriyah on Friday, when the driver of the vehicle in which the youngsters were traveling ignored warnings to stop, creating fears of a suicide attack.
Capt. Jay Delarosa, spokesman for the 15th U.S. Marine Expeditionary Unit, said nine other people in the minivan were wounded in the incident.
“Our Marines took action to protect themselves against what they thought was a suicide bomber,” Delarosa told Reuters, adding that the driver had ignored repeated warnings to stop.
“Currently, we are providing the best available medical assistance to those injured,” he said, adding that no weapons had been found in the vehicle. “It was a regrettable mistake.”
On Thursday, one day after the jubilant celebrations of U.S. forces’ taking control of Iraq’s capital, a suicide bomber attacked a checkpoint Thursday in downtown Baghdad, wounding four Marines, while fierce firefights continued in pockets of the city.
The suicide attack occurred about 7:30 p.m. (11:30 a.m. ET) near Firdos Square, where a large statue of Saddam had been pulled down a day earlier.
Marine Capt. Joe Plenzler said that according to initial reports, “a man strapped with explosives approached a Marine checkpoint and detonated himself.” He had no details on the condition of the wounded.
Saddam’s regime had warned that suicide attacks would be “routine military policy,” and U.S. troops have been wary when civilians approach.
NBC News’ Chip Reid, who arrived at the scene moments after the attack, noted how the Marines’ mood plunged as they evacuated the wounded. Only minutes earlier, the Americans were commenting on how delighted they were about their unexpectedly warm welcome in the city.
Maj. Gen. Gene Renuart, director of operations at U.S. Central Command forward headquarters in Doah, Qatar, said the capital of 5 million people was completely circled by U.S. forces. But he added, “Baghdad is still an ugly place,” with pockets of resistance.
Hundreds of desperate Iraqi civilians besieged the national headquarters of Iraq’s military intelligence in Baghdad on Friday, searching for relatives they said had been detained there.
Reuters correspondent Khaled Yacoub Oweis, speaking from the northwestern Baghdad district of Kadhimiya, said relatives and others were appealing for help from the U.S. military to rescue people they said were in underground jails.
“They say they are sure there are people who have been here for days without food and may be dying,” he said, adding that people in the crowd were asking where the U.S. forces were.
COMPLICATIONS ON THE NORTHERN FRONT
Chaos also crept in to disrupt the battle plan as Kurdish fighters rushed into the northern city of Kirkuk on the heels of Iraqi forces, despite well-laid plans for U.S. forces to lead the invasion.
The move alarmed Turkey, which is concerned that the Kurds will take over the nearby oilfields and use the wealth to launch their own breakaway state of Kurdistan, a state that might try to lay claim to a chunk of eastern Turkey populated largely by Turkish Kurds. The Kurdish rebellion on Turkish soil from 1982 to 1995 left 15,000 people dead.
Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said Turkey was ready to do “whatever is necessary” to safeguard its interests. But Gul appeared reassured by a subsequent telephone conversation with U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who, he said, “gave his word new U.S. forces will be sent to Kirkuk in a few hours to remove the ‘peshmerga’ who have gone in there.”
Gul said Powell’s reassurances meant there was “no need for tension” in northern Iraq, but he added that Turkey would send military observers into the city soon, a measure likely to be viewed with suspicion by Kurdish groups.
Meanwhile in Kirkuk, the Kurds had ransacked the house of Izzert Ibrahim, Saddam’s widely hated vice president who is accused of war crimes for his part in massacring thousands of Kurds.
Downtown, the looting went on in supermarkets for food, in empty houses for anything that was not nailed down and at gasoline stations for free fuel.
WIDESPREAD LOOTING
President Bush promised war-battered Iraqis Thursday that the United States and its war allies would help keep order amid the looting.
“Coalition forces will help maintain law and order so that Iraqis can live in security,” Bush said in a videotaped message to the Iraqi people.
But the looting made it clear that many Iraqis were taking advantage of the window of opportunity before order could be established.
While some soldiers and paramilitaries who enforced Saddam’s once-fearsome rule continued to fight on his behalf, looters ransacked the homes of government officials.
In Baghdad, looters carted off bottles of wine and whiskey, guns and paintings of half-naked women from the luxury home of Odai Hussein, Saddam’s playboy son. They also picked clean his yacht and made off with some of the white Arabian horses he kept.
What they could not carry they destroyed.
Looters also descended on the homes Saddam’s feared cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as Chemical Ali, and Izzat Ibrahim, Saddam’s right-hand man.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said that a Baghdad hospital was ransacked Thursday and that street violence and looting forced the closings of others.
Nada Doumani, a Red Cross spokeswoman in Geneva, said the Al Kindi hospital near the city center was attacked by armed looters who stripped it of everything, including beds, electrical fittings and medical equipment.
“Security in the city is very bad and people are not daring to go to the hospitals,” she said. “Small hospitals have closed their doors, and big hospitals are inaccessible.”
Furious medical students and staff took to the streets to try to intercept the looters and get back the supplies.
Wivina Belmonte, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Children’s Fund, said the aid body’s own UNICEF offices in Baghdad were looted, hampering any future relief efforts.
“The widespread looting and chaos spread to UNICEF’s office with phones, chairs — essentially everything was taken away,” Belmonte told Reuters.
“The continued chaos in Baghdad is alarming, and more generally we are seeing an unfolding picture of too much desperation, too many guns and families living in fear and uncertainty,” she added.
A staff member of the International Red Cross was killed Tuesday in crossfire. Amid the danger, the organization briefly suspended its operations in the city.
Looting was also reported this week in the south central city of Basra, which is in British hands.
U.S. HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR ORDER
Now that the leadership has disappeared, people are looking to the United States to establish order.
“I want to really stress that it’s the responsibility of the forces in charge to ensure hospitals and supply stations are safe and that people can get access to medical care. They have to ensure access to civilian infrastructure,” said Doumani of the Red Cross.
International aid officials criticized U.S. and British troops for failing to rein in looting mobs, saying they were obliged as an occupying force under international law to prevent chaos.
“The coalition forces seem to be completely unable to restrain looters or impose any sort of control on the mobs that now govern the streets,” said Veronique Taveau, a spokeswoman for the U.N. Office of the Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq. “This inaction by the occupying powers is in violation of the Geneva Conventions.”
Officers in the 7th Marine Regiment said they received orders Thursday night to try to stop looting — at their discretion.
Lt. Col. Michael Belcher, commander of the regiment’s 3rd Battalion, said his priorities were first to protect key structures, such as the power system, and second to safeguard humanitarian sites like hospitals and aid distribution centers. Commercial buildings are last, he said.
“If I see them tearing down electrical infrastructure in some of these facilities, I’ll step in to stop it,” Belcher said. “What we found so far is that if you confront the looters, they’ll put it down and go away.”
He also said that on their own initiative, the 7th Marines planned to enforce a dusk-to-dawn curfew beginning Friday evening in the area the regiment was patrolling in eastern Baghdad.
White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said it would take time for the security situation to stabilize. “These things need to be measured over time,” he said. It was not clear exactly what actions the United States would take.
NBC correspondents in Washington, Iraq and Kuwait, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
Despite military gains throughout Iraq, U.S. forces grappled with rising chaos and violence Friday as widespread looting underscored deep poverty and the lapse of police authority. The brutal murder of two Shiite religious leaders laid bare the deep religious and ethnic divides, while the killing of two children at a checkpoint in Nasiriyah and a suicide bomb attack on Marines at a checkpoint in Baghdad served as grim reminders of the lingering threat from Iraqis still loyal to Saddam Hussein and the tension under which coalition forces are operating.
THE HOLY CITY of Najaf was the site of one of the grisliest events Thursday when a crowd rushed two Islamic clerics and hacked them to death, witnesses said, at a meeting meant to serve as a model for reconciliation in post-Saddam Iraq. Despite allegations that loyalists to Saddam were responsible, the motive for the killings remained a mystery.
“People attacked and killed both of them inside the mosque,” said Ali Assayid Haider, a mullah who traveled from the southern city of Basra for the meeting.
The accounts could not be independently confirmed.
The killings of the clerics, Haider al-Kadar and Abdul Majid al-Khoei, took place at the shrine of Imam Ali, one of the holiest sites of Shiite Islam, which is practiced by the majority of Iraqis.
Witnesses told reporters that a meeting was held at 10 a.m. (2 a.m. ET) among leading mullahs about how to control the shrine, which has been under the supervision of al-Kadar, who was widely disliked because of his role as a member of Saddam’s Religion Ministry.
In a gesture of reconciliation, al-Kadar was accompanied by al-Khoei, son of one of the religion’s most prominent ayatollahs and himself a high-ranking Shiite cleric.
When the two men appeared at the shrine, members of another faction loyal to a different mullah, Mohammed Braga al-Saddar, verbally assailed al-Kadar.
Apparently feeling threatened, al-Khoei pulled a gun and fired one or two shots. Accounts conflicted over whether he fired into the air or into the crowd.
The crowd rushed both men and hacked them to death with swords and knives. An unknown number of people were injured.
GRIM REMINDERS
U.S. Marines said they killed two children at a checkpoint in Nasiriyah on Friday, when the driver of the vehicle in which the youngsters were traveling ignored warnings to stop, creating fears of a suicide attack.
Capt. Jay Delarosa, spokesman for the 15th U.S. Marine Expeditionary Unit, said nine other people in the minivan were wounded in the incident.
“Our Marines took action to protect themselves against what they thought was a suicide bomber,” Delarosa told Reuters, adding that the driver had ignored repeated warnings to stop.
“Currently, we are providing the best available medical assistance to those injured,” he said, adding that no weapons had been found in the vehicle. “It was a regrettable mistake.”
On Thursday, one day after the jubilant celebrations of U.S. forces’ taking control of Iraq’s capital, a suicide bomber attacked a checkpoint Thursday in downtown Baghdad, wounding four Marines, while fierce firefights continued in pockets of the city.
The suicide attack occurred about 7:30 p.m. (11:30 a.m. ET) near Firdos Square, where a large statue of Saddam had been pulled down a day earlier.
Marine Capt. Joe Plenzler said that according to initial reports, “a man strapped with explosives approached a Marine checkpoint and detonated himself.” He had no details on the condition of the wounded.
Saddam’s regime had warned that suicide attacks would be “routine military policy,” and U.S. troops have been wary when civilians approach.
NBC News’ Chip Reid, who arrived at the scene moments after the attack, noted how the Marines’ mood plunged as they evacuated the wounded. Only minutes earlier, the Americans were commenting on how delighted they were about their unexpectedly warm welcome in the city.
Maj. Gen. Gene Renuart, director of operations at U.S. Central Command forward headquarters in Doah, Qatar, said the capital of 5 million people was completely circled by U.S. forces. But he added, “Baghdad is still an ugly place,” with pockets of resistance.
Hundreds of desperate Iraqi civilians besieged the national headquarters of Iraq’s military intelligence in Baghdad on Friday, searching for relatives they said had been detained there.
Reuters correspondent Khaled Yacoub Oweis, speaking from the northwestern Baghdad district of Kadhimiya, said relatives and others were appealing for help from the U.S. military to rescue people they said were in underground jails.
“They say they are sure there are people who have been here for days without food and may be dying,” he said, adding that people in the crowd were asking where the U.S. forces were.
COMPLICATIONS ON THE NORTHERN FRONT
Chaos also crept in to disrupt the battle plan as Kurdish fighters rushed into the northern city of Kirkuk on the heels of Iraqi forces, despite well-laid plans for U.S. forces to lead the invasion.
The move alarmed Turkey, which is concerned that the Kurds will take over the nearby oilfields and use the wealth to launch their own breakaway state of Kurdistan, a state that might try to lay claim to a chunk of eastern Turkey populated largely by Turkish Kurds. The Kurdish rebellion on Turkish soil from 1982 to 1995 left 15,000 people dead.
Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said Turkey was ready to do “whatever is necessary” to safeguard its interests. But Gul appeared reassured by a subsequent telephone conversation with U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who, he said, “gave his word new U.S. forces will be sent to Kirkuk in a few hours to remove the ‘peshmerga’ who have gone in there.”
Gul said Powell’s reassurances meant there was “no need for tension” in northern Iraq, but he added that Turkey would send military observers into the city soon, a measure likely to be viewed with suspicion by Kurdish groups.
Meanwhile in Kirkuk, the Kurds had ransacked the house of Izzert Ibrahim, Saddam’s widely hated vice president who is accused of war crimes for his part in massacring thousands of Kurds.
Downtown, the looting went on in supermarkets for food, in empty houses for anything that was not nailed down and at gasoline stations for free fuel.
WIDESPREAD LOOTING
President Bush promised war-battered Iraqis Thursday that the United States and its war allies would help keep order amid the looting.
“Coalition forces will help maintain law and order so that Iraqis can live in security,” Bush said in a videotaped message to the Iraqi people.
But the looting made it clear that many Iraqis were taking advantage of the window of opportunity before order could be established.
While some soldiers and paramilitaries who enforced Saddam’s once-fearsome rule continued to fight on his behalf, looters ransacked the homes of government officials.
In Baghdad, looters carted off bottles of wine and whiskey, guns and paintings of half-naked women from the luxury home of Odai Hussein, Saddam’s playboy son. They also picked clean his yacht and made off with some of the white Arabian horses he kept.
What they could not carry they destroyed.
Looters also descended on the homes Saddam’s feared cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as Chemical Ali, and Izzat Ibrahim, Saddam’s right-hand man.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said that a Baghdad hospital was ransacked Thursday and that street violence and looting forced the closings of others.
Nada Doumani, a Red Cross spokeswoman in Geneva, said the Al Kindi hospital near the city center was attacked by armed looters who stripped it of everything, including beds, electrical fittings and medical equipment.
“Security in the city is very bad and people are not daring to go to the hospitals,” she said. “Small hospitals have closed their doors, and big hospitals are inaccessible.”
Furious medical students and staff took to the streets to try to intercept the looters and get back the supplies.
Wivina Belmonte, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Children’s Fund, said the aid body’s own UNICEF offices in Baghdad were looted, hampering any future relief efforts.
“The widespread looting and chaos spread to UNICEF’s office with phones, chairs — essentially everything was taken away,” Belmonte told Reuters.
“The continued chaos in Baghdad is alarming, and more generally we are seeing an unfolding picture of too much desperation, too many guns and families living in fear and uncertainty,” she added.
A staff member of the International Red Cross was killed Tuesday in crossfire. Amid the danger, the organization briefly suspended its operations in the city.
Looting was also reported this week in the south central city of Basra, which is in British hands.
U.S. HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR ORDER
Now that the leadership has disappeared, people are looking to the United States to establish order.
“I want to really stress that it’s the responsibility of the forces in charge to ensure hospitals and supply stations are safe and that people can get access to medical care. They have to ensure access to civilian infrastructure,” said Doumani of the Red Cross.
International aid officials criticized U.S. and British troops for failing to rein in looting mobs, saying they were obliged as an occupying force under international law to prevent chaos.
“The coalition forces seem to be completely unable to restrain looters or impose any sort of control on the mobs that now govern the streets,” said Veronique Taveau, a spokeswoman for the U.N. Office of the Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq. “This inaction by the occupying powers is in violation of the Geneva Conventions.”
Officers in the 7th Marine Regiment said they received orders Thursday night to try to stop looting — at their discretion.
Lt. Col. Michael Belcher, commander of the regiment’s 3rd Battalion, said his priorities were first to protect key structures, such as the power system, and second to safeguard humanitarian sites like hospitals and aid distribution centers. Commercial buildings are last, he said.
“If I see them tearing down electrical infrastructure in some of these facilities, I’ll step in to stop it,” Belcher said. “What we found so far is that if you confront the looters, they’ll put it down and go away.”
He also said that on their own initiative, the 7th Marines planned to enforce a dusk-to-dawn curfew beginning Friday evening in the area the regiment was patrolling in eastern Baghdad.
White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said it would take time for the security situation to stabilize. “These things need to be measured over time,” he said. It was not clear exactly what actions the United States would take.
NBC correspondents in Washington, Iraq and Kuwait, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.