More die as Sanchez sees decrease in Iraq attacks

Al-Jazeerah Info Center needs your support

to continue providing you with this free service

Send donations by check to: Al-Jazeerah Info Center, P.O. Box 724, Dalton, GA 30722-0724, USA.

or through PayPal, using credit cards or bank transfers

BAGHDAD (AFP) — More deadly violence has hit Iraq as US President George W. Bush said he thought Vice President Dick Cheney's old company, Halliburton, overcharged for work it did in Iraq and should refund the money. Despite a string of recent fatalities, the top US military commander in Iraq said Saturday that attacks on coalition soldiers had fallen to "around 20" per day.

"We have achieved a significant decrease in attacks," Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez said.

In November, which proved to be the deadliest month for US soldiers in Iraq, the number of daily attacks surpassed 35 and hit 55 on one occasion.

"We've been able to make effective headway against these terrorist and anti-coalition elements," he said, stressing that troops were taking a step back from dramatic raids.

Sanchez also said the coalition was reviewing the pay scale for the New Iraqi Army after about 300 soldiers — nearly half of the first battalion — quit two days ago.

He said more "cordon-and-knock" style operations, where US forces seal off an area where they believe the enemy might be hiding and then approach the target, spared civilians and prevented troops from alienating Iraqis.

A senior US officer was relieved of his command and fined $5,000 after being found guilty of assaulting and threatening an Iraqi detainee, but will not face a full court martial, the 4th Infantry Division (ID) said Saturday.

Late Friday, US soldiers gunned down an Iraqi man in Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, saying he opened fire on them from a car just outside a US military base.

The driver claimed the two had been firing celebratory shots in the air for a wedding when the soldiers, from the 4th ID, hit his friend with four gunshots to the head.

But Lieutenant Colonel Steven Russell, who commands the 1-22 battalion, said "that certainly wasn't a wedding and it turned into a funeral."

Meanwhile, a US soldier died and another two were wounded after their convoy was hit by a roadside bomb early Friday in the flash point town of Ramadi, a military spokesman said Saturday.

The attack in Ramadi, 100 kilometres west of Baghdad, came just a day after a suicide bomber blew up a furniture delivery truck outside the US military base there killing one US soldier and wounding 14. The latest deaths brought to 197 the number of US soldiers who have died in combat in Iraq since Bush declared major combat over on May 1.

Amid the dogged unrest, Georgia is to send 500 soldiers to Iraq by next summer US ambassador to Tbilisi, Richard Miles, said Saturday.

They will join 70 elite troops, doctors and mine-clearing experts who were sent to Baghdad in August.

Two-hundred soldiers will fly out shortly, and by summer 2004 some 500 will have joined the first contingent, Miles said during a graduation ceremony for a Georgian battalion trained by US instructors.

But UN chief Kofi Annan has ruled out sending UN peacekeepers to Iraq, while saying the war-torn country would need military aid for years to come, in an interview with Germany's weekly news magazine Der Spiegel to be published Monday.

He lashed out again at the US strategy of preemptive action which led to the launch of the war in March and warned that if others followed suit the "law of the jungle" would prevail.

In London, British Prime Minister Tony Blair's special envoy to Iraq said NATO forces should take a more prominent security role in the country from the middle of next year, newspapers reported Saturday.

And Halliburton stayed in the headlines Saturday, after Pentagon sources said a subsidiary of the US energy giant overcharged US forces in Iraq for gasoline by up to $61 million.

The conglomerate denied the allegation, but Bush said Friday: "If there is an overcharge, like we think there is, we expect that money to be repaid."

Former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright went on the attack Saturday, criticising Washington for its contracts' decision and no proper postwar roadmap for Iraq.

By invading Iraq and by its postwar actions, the United States was damaging its reputation and losing political capital, said Albright in New Delhi.

"Democracy cannot be imposed from above. That is a contradiction in terms," she said.

The present chaos in Iraq was acting like a "magnet," attracting people opposed to the United States to operate from there, she said.