BAGHDAD, 17 October 2004 — Insurgents bombed five churches in Iraq yesterday as car bombs killed five US soldiers. The two car bombs that killed the US soldiers went off Friday, the military said. One, carried out by a suicide bomber driving an explosive-laden vehicle, targeted a US patrol near the town of Qaim, an insurgent hotspot near the border with Syria, killing four US soldiers, according to Lt. Col. Chris Woodbridge, commander of the 1st Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment.
The other blast went off in the city of Mosul, 364 km north of Baghdad, killing a US soldier assigned to Task Force Olympia, the military said.
Five churches were hit in a string of bomb attacks before dawn that seemed designed to intimidate the country’s small but deep-rooted Christian community, already shaken by a deadlier series of bombings of churches that killed 11 people in August.
“If they don’t want us in Iraq, let them say it and we will leave,” said Samir Hermiz, 40, standing by a Catholic church reduced to ashes. “I’m really thinking of leaving Iraq.”
Iraq’s 650,000 Christians, about three percent of the population, are mostly Chaldeans, Assyrians and Catholics.
The US military has accused Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi of carrying out bombings aimed at fueling sectarian strife and civil war.
The US military denied a Kuwait News Agency report that Zarqawi had been detained with 10 other Iraqis near Fallujah. “We have heard those reports and we do not believe they are true,” Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, a US military spokesman in Baghdad, said. An Iraqi Defense Ministry spokesman also denied the report.
In another challenge for the US-backed interim government, the group led by Zarqawi vowed to attack foreign trucks bringing petrol and diesel into Iraq. A Tawhid wal Jihad pamphlet said non-Iraqi trucks bringing in imported petrol and diesel would be “subject to destruction”.
US Marines, backed by Iraqi forces, said they had set up what they described as a “dynamic cordon” around Fallujah since Thursday, setting up checkpoints and carrying out ground assaults on objectives outside the city’s confines. Residents said US forces bombarded western Fallujah, destroying a house and killing a baby girl. Three other children and a woman were wounded.
In a glimmer of hope for a peaceful resolution, local cleric Sheikh Abdul Hamid Jadu indicated that a delegation from the city was ready to return to the negotiating table with the government, but conditioned this on a halt to US airstrikes and the release of fellow negotiator Sheikh Khaled Hamoud.
In other violence, a mortar round exploded in the garden of the Ibn Al-Betar hospital in Baghdad, killing one person. Officials said the blast at the hospital could have been far worse: The building was under renovation at the time and there were no patients there.
Another mortar round hit the parking lot of Al-Mansour Hotel, where some foreign journalists and diplomats stay. There were no reports of casualties there, the Interior Ministry said.
Meanwhile, British media reports said yesterday that UK troops could be moved into more dangerous areas nearer Baghdad in a politically charged move military analysts said would represent a significant escalation of Britain’s profile in Iraq.
Up to 650 troops could be involved in the move to cover for US units battling insurgents in Fallujah and elsewhere.
Any prospect of the British casualty rate rising sharply will be acutely uncomfortable to Prime Minister Tony Blair whose unpopular decision to join US President George W. Bush in the March 2003 invasion has hit his ratings and divided his party.
A Ministry of Defense spokesman in London confirmed discussions had taken place with American commanders but said no decision had been taken. “There are always ongoing discussions with our coalition partners,” he added. “That is part and parcel of being part of the coalition.”
Any deployment closer to the Iraqi capital would be the first time British troops have operated outside the relatively quiet Basra area of southern Iraq where some 8,000 UK soldiers are stationed.
The move, possibly by the Black Watch regiment, would be meant to last only a few weeks, the media reports said.
In Basra, a British military spokesman said such requests for help from other areas were not unusual. But asked whether 650 troops might be involved, he added: “That is not the sort of request we get on a regular basis”.
— Additional input from agencies
