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Suicide Car Bombing Kills 13 in Baghdad •
Iraq Fuel Crisis Adds to Chaos •
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Marines Hunt Down Fallujah's Strays to Head Off Rabies Threat
Agence France Presse
Friday 10 December 2004
Fallujah - U.S. troops fire off another volley of shots amid the trashed houses of Fallujah, hunting down new adversaries carrying a potentially deadly weapon that threatens to plague reconstruction efforts.
But this time the marines are not chasing down the insurgents who they defeated in a devastating assault on the city last month. Their quarry is stray animals grown fat on the flesh from corpses and who could harbor rabies.
The marines gather briefly over a pile of trash, one pointing across the dirt lot to a row of burned out homes where moments before a dog was seen loping for cover amid the ruined buildings.
"I think we wounded a couple and they took off that way," he said, as another marine pulled his quarry onto a ridge, its bloodied head rolling side to side in the dust.
As their numbers have swelled, so has the risk the animals pose to the tens of thousands of people expected to return to Fallujah in the coming weeks. The marines have been told to organize special details to "thin out" the battered city's animal population.
Medical personnel say rabies is one of the biggest threats to people returning to the city. Cases of the disease were already reported in humans in Al-Anbar province before the Fallujah attack.
"Rabies, and standing water, are our most immediate concerns," said Captain Dennis Staggs, a surgeon with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force (MEF), adding that among a host of measures suggested to head off a health crisis, medical officers said feral animals should be cleared from the city.
"If you consider the entire public health situation, with nobody in town, there's no public health crisis, and if it is prepared correctly there won't be a health crisis," Staggs said Wednesday.
Standing by his humvee last week in northern Fallujah, marine Lance Corporal Will Lathrop of the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit said, "The problem has gotten bad enough that there's actually an order for this," referring to a command issued recently to deal with Fallujah's feral animals.
His convoy of three humvees and a truck had rolled briefly into the school occupied by 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines' Charlie Company and several men with shotguns stood around the vehicles smoking.
Rock-n-roll played loudly from one of the vehicle's radios as marines just outside the base walls fired off several more shots at flashes of fur among the piles of rubble.
It was a good day for this self-described "goon squad" - a dozen or so black plastic trash bags heavy with dead animals were dumped unceremoniously in the back of a truck.
"It eliminates the threat," marine Lieutenant Lyle Gilbert, spokesman for the 1st MEF, said Wednesday.
"Before they (residents) go into the city, dogs and cats probably should be cleared out. They're a source of rabies and other diseases."
But there was none of the bloodlust that many marines say they felt last month as they stormed the Sunni-Muslim enclave and wrested it away from insurgents during several days of vicious fighting.
A gunnery sergeant stalked past the convoy, tersely ordering his executioners to put on surgical gloves before handling the dead animals, his mouth pulled into the tight grimace of a man trying to finish the job before him as quickly as possible.
"This is hard on these guys, especially killing the dogs. But these animals have been eating dead bodies. They can spread disease," said Lieutenant Aaron Brown, grimly reciting the toll for the day - several cats and at least one dog.
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Suicide Car Bombing Kills 13 in Baghdad
By Katarina Kratovac
The Associated Press
Monday 13 December 2004
Baghdad - A suicide car bomber linked to al-Qaida killed 13 people in Baghdad on Monday, the first anniversary of Saddam Hussein's capture, and clashes resumed in Fallujah, a one-time insurgent stronghold that American forces believed they had conquered. Seven Marines died in combat in western Iraq.
The violence underlines the difficulties U.S.-led forces have encountered in the year and a half since Saddam's ouster in trying to end a rampant insurgency and bring the country under control. U.S. military commanders acknowledge they initially underestimated the strength of the insurgent backlash and admit coalition-trained Iraqi security forces are not yet up to securing their own country.
The fighting in Anbar, a vast province including Fallujah and Ramadi, was the deadliest for U.S. forces since eight Marines were killed by a car bomb outside Fallujah on Oct. 30. The deaths brought to nearly 1,300 the number of American troops killed in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.
In Baghdad, a militant in an explosives-laden car waiting in line to enter the western Harthiyah gate of the heavily fortified Green Zone, which houses the U.S. Embassy and Iraq's interim government, detonated the vehicle as he drove toward the checkpoint, police said.
Dr. Mohammed Abdel Satar of Baghdad's Yarmouk Hospital said 13 people were killed and 15 wounded in the suicide blast. The U.S. military said there were no injuries to its troops.
Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's al-Qaida in Iraq group claimed responsibility for the bombing in a statement posted on an Islamic web site regularly used by militants.
"On this blessed day, a lion from the (group's) Martyrs' Brigade has gone out to strike at a gathering of apostates and Americans in the Green Zone," the group said in a statement, the authenticity of which could not be immediately verified.
The international zone has been the scene of frequent insurgent attacks in the past 18 months, killing and wounding dozens of people in car bombings or mortar barrages.
In Tarmiyah, north of Baghdad, a car bomb exploded and wrecked two U.S. Humvees, wounding three U.S. soldiers and an Iraqi civilian, Lt. Col. James Hutton said.
Jubilant Iraqi men were seen holding up pieces of the Humvees and dancing around their charred hulks, with a large crater blown into the road.
In Mishahda, 25 miles north of Baghdad, gunmen attacked an Iraqi National Guard patrol, killing three soldiers and wounding three others. The attackers fled, witnesses said.
Iraq's interim President Ghazi al-Yawer said in an interview broadcast Monday that the U.S.-led coalition was wrong to dismantle the Iraqi security forces after last year's invasion.
"Definitely dissolving the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Interior was a big mistake at that time," al-Yawer told British Broadcasting Corp. radio.
It would have been more effective to screen out former regime loyalists than to rebuild from scratch, he added.
"As soon as we have efficient security forces that we can depend on we can see the beginning of the withdrawal of forces from our friends and partners and I think it doesn't take years, it will take months," he said.
U.S. forces retook Fallujah from insurgents in a bloody battle last month in which hundreds died, including at least 54 Americans. The city had fallen under the rule of radical clerics and their mujahedeen fighters after Marines lifted a three-week siege of the city in April.
After the latest campaign, U.S. commanders claimed they had broken the back of the insurgency in the mainly Sunni Muslim areas of western Iraq and that Iraqi security forces would start being phased in to take over, but fighting in the region has continued.
"We have come light years from April when they (Iraqi security forces) refused to even come out to Fallujah," Marine Lt. Col. Dan Wilson said. "We are in the process of phasing more ISF into Fallujah ... (and) are better equipped to intuitively know who belongs in the city, and who does not."
On Sunday, American jets dropped 10 precision-guided missiles on insurgents' positions in Fallujah after militants fought running battles with coalition forces. It was unclear if there were any insurgent casualties.
"We are still running into some of these die-hard insurgents that have either come back into the city or have been laying low," spokesman Lt. Lyle Gilbert said. "As we are bringing in contractors to help with the reconstruction of Fallujah, this (fighting) slows the process down."
It also was unclear whether the latest Marine deaths were connected with those clashes. The military said only that seven Marines died in two incidents while conducting "security and stabilization operations" in Anbar province.
In nearby Ramadi, 30 miles west of Fallujah, at least 10 explosions were heard early Monday, but no details were immediately available on their source nor whether there were any casualties.
Insurgents had shelled U.S. forces in the city on Sunday resulting in retaliatory artillery fire by American troops.
In the central Iraqi city of Samarra, insurgents attacked patrolling U.S. soldiers with small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. One missed the troops and detonated near a group of children, killing a 9-year-old boy and injuring another child, U.S. military spokesman Maj. Neal O'Brien said.
On Sunday, eight of Saddam's 11 top lieutenants went on a hunger strike to demand visits in jail from the International Committee of the Red Cross, military spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Johnson said.
The eight had resumed eating by Monday, he said. Saddam had not joined in the protest and remained in good health, Johnson said.
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Iraq Fuel Crisis Adds to Chaos
By Rory McCarthy and Osama Mansour
The Guardian U.K.
Monday 13 December 2004
Baghdad is in the grip of the most serious fuel crisis since the war, forcing drivers to spend more than a day queuing for petrol and underlining the government's struggle to maintain even basic services weeks ahead of elections.
In the past two weeks queues often hundreds of cars long have stretched for miles, and disputes between drivers and police have turned violent. In one incident last week at a petrol station in Yarmouk, an affluent area of western Baghdad, a police major was shot dead by a man in the queue.
Government officials have blamed attacks by insurgents for a sharp fuel shortage in a country that has the world's second largest supply of oil.
But petrol station managers say the problems stem more from electricity shortages that prevent pumps from working, higher demand from Iraqis who rely on petrol not just for their cars but to run generators for their homes, and from the dramatic increase in the number of cars on the road since the war last year. A new night-time curfew in Baghdad has also meant petrol stations no longer stay open late.
A black market has rapidly sprung up with hawkers on street corners selling petrol for up to 1,000 dinars (40p) a litre, compared with the official station price of 20 dinars.
"Since I was a young man until now I never saw a crisis like this," said one manager at a petrol station in Yarmouk, who was too afraid to give his name.
Last week, as drivers formed a queue three miles long at his station, a row broke out between a black marketeer who was trying to fill a 25-litre container and a police major, Hazem Abdal Hassan, who was guarding the station.
"The police officer stopped him from filling his container but then there was a fight," the station manager said. "Suddenly the man pulled out a pistol and shot the policeman dead in the neck."
Police officers nearby arrested the man but the station manager said the police were frequently corrupt.
"The police were supposed to be organizing the queue and stopping the black market but they just filled their own cars and filled jerry cans with petrol and sold them to the hawkers," he said.
There was a less severe fuel crisis in the months after the war last year and the government eventually managed to ease the queues by limiting the amount of fuel each driver could buy at a time.
But now the return of the crisis has left Iraqis increasingly frustrated at a time when electricity shortages are worsening. Some homes in the capital receive only a few hours' electricity a day.
"I've been here since yesterday and I'm still queuing," said one driver stuck in a long queue in Alwiya Street, in central Baghdad. "Life is just the same as it was before the war, only the faces have changed. No one cares."
U.S. officials privately admit that the fuel crisis could trigger widespread unrest before the election due on January 30. "If the current situation does not improve quickly, public confidence in the government may deteriorate significantly," one diplomat wrote in an internal memo obtained by Reuters.
Iraq's oil minister, Thamir al-Ghadhban, said extra security was being laid on to protect convoys bringing fuel into the capital. "We are facing determined foes and an unprecedented threat. They want to deprive Baghdad of fuel to create a political crisis," he told reporters over the weekend.
He said the Dora oil refinery, the largest in the capital, was working only intermittently and the three pipelines that supply it with crude oil were regularly sabotaged. The main northern export pipeline to Turkey was attacked on Friday, dramatically limiting the flow of oil. Last month, shipments of oil from the north were only half the scheduled amount.
The oil ministry said it lost £3.5bn in potential revenues between August and October because of sabotage.
While there were just two attacks on pipelines in Iraq in February, there were 27 such attacks last month, Mr. Ghadhban said.
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