RAMADI, Iraq, 8 July 2003 — The gruesome death of an Iraqi man whose head was shot off inflamed anti-American rage in the volatile town of Ramadi yesterday after a night of armed attacks which wounded four US troops. Several Iraqis gathered around his bullet-ridden car where a piece of skull lay among the shattered windshield glass on the floorboard.
Another crowd walked past pools of blood at Ramadi General Hospital and watched a doctor pull plastic sheeting off his corpse that was punctured by bullets they said were fired by US troops occupying the town, around 100 km west of Baghdad. “You will see what will happen to the Americans now. You will see what we will do to them,” hospital administrator Taha Hussein said.
On Saturday, seven recruits to a US-backed Iraqi police force were killed in Ramadi when a remote-controlled bomb exploded outside a police station. Ramadi is part of a mainly Sunni Muslim area to the north and west of Baghdad where US forces have faced much of the most violent resistance to their occupation of Iraq.
“The Americans are terrorists. They don’t respect us. They enter our houses and frisk our women. They handcuff us at checkpoints and step on our necks,” said Abu Mohsen. “Now look at this. They just shoot at cars and kill innocent people,” he said pointing to the body of the decapitated man on a stretcher outside the morgue. The circumstances surrounding the death of the man, identified by a hospital official as Ibrahim Himoud, were unclear.
Meanwhile, representatives of major Iraqi political groups gathered in the Kurdish-held north yesterday to discuss plans by the US-led administration for an interim governing body. The meeting will “focus on many important issues, headed by the formation of a transitory governing council and constitutional commission,” Kurdistan Democratic Party official Roj Nouri Shawis told AFP in Salahaddin, north of Arbil, in KDP-controlled territory.
“Participants will examine names (to choose) the person who will head the transitory governing council,” Shawis said, adding that the situation in Iraq and the security and economic future of the country would also feature on the agenda. Members of a seven-strong “leadership council” comprise the main parties that opposed ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
The KDP and the other main Kurdish party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, are members of the council, which also includes the Pentagon-backed Iraqi National Congress and the Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the country’s main Shiite Muslim group. Other members are the Iraqi National Accord Movement, the Shiite Dawa party, and Nasseer Al-Chaderchi, a Sunni Muslim representative.
According to UN special envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello, US overseer Paul Bremer will unveil in the next two weeks a “transitory governing council” with real executive powers, in a departure from earlier plans to give the interim body a strictly advisory role. Bremer had told the main Iraqi political groups on June 1 that a future Iraqi interim body, to be set up by mid-July, would be led by a 25- to 30-strong political council that would name “key advisers” to government ministries and offer advice to Bremer.
