BAGHDAD, 21 March 2004 — The anniversary of the US-led war to oust Saddam Hussein passed almost unnoticed in Iraq yesterday, as attacks on civilians and troops continued amid official warnings of more “bad days to come”.
While people rallied en masse around the world in protest against the war launched one year ago, Iraqi people for the most part ignored the date and said they were more likely to gather next month on the anniversary of Saddam’s fall.
“We would probably celebrate on April 9 because on that day, we got rid of Saddam and his evil regime, but we will not celebrate the launch of a war that has left us with nothing so far,” said former government employee Adnan Saad.
“We are happy that Saddam is gone, but what have we got instead? I am unemployed and I stopped sending my five children to school mainly because of the catastrophic security situation,” he said.
The anniversary comes after a week of heavy violence, including a suicide bombing and rocket strikes on hotels in the capital, and other attacks on US troops, police and civilians, including journalists.
In the latest incidents, an Iraqi police officer was shot dead early yesterrday at a checkpoint near the northern oil centre of Kirkuk while a local Turkmen community leader there survived an assassination attempt. The attacks came as US military and civilian officials multiplied their warnings that more spectacular attacks were likely as the June 30 deadline for a return of sovereignty to the Iraqi people neared.
“I expect in the run-up period to the transition of June 30 that we will have some really bad days,” Iraq’s US civilian administrator Paul Bremer told reporters Friday.
“The terrorists are going to continue and even accelerate their attacks particularly on Iraqi men, women and children as they did in Karbala ... and it happened the night before last here in Baghdad,” he said.
With tensions high, a senior coalition official said a team of UN election experts would arrive within 10 days, and that UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi should return to the war-torn country in a few weeks.
A third group of Japanese soldiers arrived yesterrday in southern Iraq from Kuwait as thousands of people marched in Tokyo opposed to Japanese deployment in Iraq on the anniversary of the war.
A column of 50 vehicles and 130 soldiers reached the base in Samawa, a Shiite city 270 kilometers south of Baghdad, where a Japanese contingent is already based, an AFP photographer reported. They were among 190 Japanese Self-Defense Ground Forces troops who arrived in Kuwait last Sunday and had been undergoing training in US a camp there in preparation for their mission, Lt. Col. Shigeru Yamasaki said.
The remaining 60 soldiers, including 11 women, were due to cross into Iraq within a “few days,” Yamasaki, head of the Task Planning and Liaison Unit, said from the Kuwait-Iraqi border. The women will be the first female Japanese soldiers to be deployed to Iraq and join about 240 Japanese ground troops already stationed in Samawa.
Meanwhile, around 2,000 people gathered in Cairo’s central Tahreer Square yesterday to protest against the US-led occupation of Iraq. Protesters carried banners mocking the failure of the US-led coalition to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD), whose alleged existence in the hands of the Iraqi president was given by both Washington and London as the prime reason for the war.
The demonstrators were surrounded by a massive security deployment, estimated at more than 5,000 policemen, which allowed only one access to Tahreer Square, which lies not far from the US and the British embassies.
