BAGHDAD, 9 December 2003 — A US soldier and an Iraqi policeman were killed in separate attacks in Iraq yesterday as the continuing violence prompted dozens of South Korean contractors to pull out of the country and Bangladesh to close its embassy. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, spokesman for the US Army in Iraq, said the soldier from the 101st Airborne Division was killed in a driveby shooting in the northern city of Mosul, which has seen an upsurge in attacks on American troops.
“There was a drive-by shooting by four Iraqis. They shot and killed him,” Kimmitt told a news conference. The shooting brought to 308 the number of US soldiers killed in action in Iraq since they invaded in March, including 193 killed since major combat was declared over on May 1. On Sunday, a roadside bomb blast in Mosul killed one US soldier and wounded two.
Last month, guerrillas mortared the headquarters of the 101st Airborne, killing one soldier.
In Baquba, 65 km north of Baghdad, a police bomb disposal expert was killed when a tank round planted on a busy street was detonated by remote control, a US military commander in the city said. Iraqi police and others seen to be working or cooperating with US and allied authorities are increasingly the target of attacks by loyalists to the former regime.
In Baghdad, Abdel Aziz Al-Hakim, the president of the US-backed Governing Council, said steps were being taken to set up war crimes tribunals to try former senior members of the regime for crimes against humanity. “They will be in the hands of Iraqis, with an Iraqi criminal law. It’s possible that there could be judges from abroad, the United Nations or other countries, as observers. These trials can be public, with representation by lawyers,” he said.
“All of this can assure the justice and scrupulousness of the tribunals,” Hakim, a cleric who heads Iraq’s largest Shiite Muslim political movement in the country, told Reuters. Many of those who could face trial appear on the US Army’s 55 most-wanted list. Most have already been detained, but Saddam remains at large with a $25 million bounty on his head.
Iraqi officials have been keen to ease domestic concerns that tribunals set up under US occupation would be politically driven forums for revenge. Iraqi former officials have been held largely incommunicado, apart from visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross, in what human rights activists call a legal limbo.
The United States dubs them “high-interest detainees” and has classified 4,000 others as “security detainees”. Others are held as prisoners of war, the only category recognized by international law and covered by the Geneva Conventions. Saddam’s government systematically persecuted Shiites whom it viewed as a fifth column with ties to Iran, and used chemical weapons on Iraqi Kurds during the 1980s in a military campaign to crush their separatist ambitions. Hakim said the tribunals would be one of the functions of a sovereign Iraqi authority to which Washington — under domestic pressure over troop casualties as elections approach — hopes to hand over power by the end of June. Hakim said the council was nearing agreement on a key element of Washington’s political strategy from Iraq — a body to pick an interim government that would oversee the drafting of a constitution and elections in 2005.
