British soldiers died in clashes with angry crowd

News, June 2003, Al-Jazeerah.info

Jordan Times, 6/26/03

BAGHDAD (AFP) — Six British soldiers killed in southern Iraq were shot dead after confronting angry demonstrators, residents said Wednesday, as British Prime Minister Tony Blair ruled out sending more troops to the country. Meanwhile, the US overseer in Iraq, Paul Bremer, blamed members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party for the sabotage that, he said, was responsible for what are now two days without electrical power in Baghdad.

Iraq's Northern Oil Co. said Wednesday the latest attack a day earlier targeted an oil pipeline northwest of Baghdad that supplies a refinery and a power plant in the capital.

Speaking in the House of Commons after Tuesday's incident in Al Majar Al Kabir, a Shiite town in southern Iraq, Blair said the security situation was “still obviously serious.”

But he said he was told earlier Wednesday by Chief of Defence Staff General Sir Michael Walker that commanders in Iraq felt they had enough troops on the ground.

He suggested that the incident might have resulted from attempts by British forces to disarm Iraqis around the town, which is midway between Baghdad and Iraq's second city, Basra.

“There had been problems in relation to that, and that may form part of the background to it but at the moment it is simply too early to say,” Blair said.

On Iraq as a whole, Blair said: “There are real problems, but there are also real improvements.”

The dead were the first British fatalities in Iraq since the war to overthrow Saddam was officially declared over on May 1.

In Al Majar Al Kabir, residents said the six soldiers died in a shoot-out with local people. Another eight Britons and 17 Iraqis were injured in firefights when the troops were confronted by a crowd of around 300 people.

Locals were angered by British troops carrying out house searches with dogs, one resident said. Islam considers dogs unclean.

Some residents said troops first opened fire on a crowd of angry demonstrators but the town's local council chief, Abu Maryam, said the first shots came from the crowd.

A senior British officer in Baghdad told AFP the killing of the Royal Military Police soldiers was not a sign of a general increase in local resistance or deteriorating security.

“In terms of whether it's a signpost to the future and what may happen, it's too early to say definitely, but the early indication is that it is not,” he said on condition of anonymity.

But matters looked to be cooling down. Abu Maryam said town leaders had met with British troops who agreed to suspend searches in the town for two months, and both sides had agreed to formally apologise for the bloody incident.

Abu Maryam also blamed the shooting on members of the ousted Baath Party.

“We are sure that they are members of the previous regime who want to create a crisis between the people and the British forces,” he said, pledging to hunt down the Iraqi gunmen.

The southern, predominantly Shiite Muslim sector of Iraq had been considered relatively stable, with reconstruction efforts well under way and no major clashes between coalition forces and local Iraqis since the end of the war.

Speaking on BBC Radio earlier, British Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon said an urgent review was under way into the security of British forces which control southern Iraq.

“Obviously, depending on the results of that review, we have more troops should that be required. We have significant forces available should it be necessary,” he said.

Britain, the main US ally in the war, now has 12,000 troops in southern Iraq.

The British had been telling themselves they were handling the postwar situation in southern Iraq better than the Americans holding the centre and north of the country, who have been coming under frequent and deadly attacks from pro-Saddam Sunni Muslim resistance groups.

The second-in-command of Iraq's main Shiite Muslim group, Abdul Aziz Al Hakim, last week rejected attacks on coalition soldiers and called instead for “peaceful” resistance.

Blair also faced political heat Wednesday on whether one of his closest aides distorted intelligence about Saddam's weapons programmes in the countdown to war.

Blair's communications director, Alistair Campbell, testified he never sought to “sex up” a September 2002 dossier on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction.

Unnamed sources have told BBC radio that the 50-page document's sensational one-sentence claim that Iraq could deploy chemical or biological weapons in just 45 minutes was inserted under pressure from Downing Street to beef up the case for war.

Until now, the coalition forces have failed to locate Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction, raising questions over whether Blair and US President George W. Bush intentionally misled their publics in order to launch a war.

In more bad news for reconstruction, an explosion tore up an oil pipeline, linked to Baghdad's main oil refinery and power plant early Tuesday in the Barwaneh region 250 kilometres northwest of the capital.

“The people here speak of sabotage,” said Rassim Abdul Khader Shaker, of the Northern Oil Co.

One villager warned that “this explosion is a message to the Americans.”

The blast was the fourth suspected sabotage of pipelines in the past two weeks.

Meanwhile, the head of a power station in western Baghdad, a mother of four, was shot dead Wednesday by unknown gunmen, an electricity official said, adding that the murder could have been carried out by “feebled-minded” residents upset over the power cuts.

US overseer Bremer, speaking to journalists in Baghdad, blamed the power outage in the capital on Baathists.

“The problem is due to sabotage of the power lines between Beiji and Baghdad. We are doing everything we can to fix this as quickly as possible,” he said.

“Almost certainly the saboteurs are rogue Baathist elements,” Bremer said.

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

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