BAGHDAD, 22 June 2005 — The new US ambassador to Iraq pledged yesterday to work with Iraqis to crush the ruthless insurgency that is throttling much of the country despite US-led offensives against the rebels. “I will work with Iraqis to break the back of the insurgency,” said Zalmay Khalilzad, who presented his credentials to President Jalal Talabani on the way to Brussels for an international conference on rebuilding Iraq. “Foreign terrorists and hard-line Baathists want Iraq to be in a civil war,” Khalilzad told reporters, referring to members of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. “Foreign terrorists are using Iraqis as cannon fodder.”
Insurgents believed to be led by Sunni Arabs and Jordanian-born extremist Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi kill scores of Iraqis almost daily, targeting members of the country’s security forces in particular. “I’m horrified by the daily suffering of the Iraqi people,” said Khalilzad, who was born in Afghanistan and just left his post as US ambassador there. “Terrorists attack ordinary people, teachers, doctors, newly trained police and others.”
Khalilzad’s words came as US and Iraqi forces battled insurgents for the fifth day in offensives in the largely lawless Al-Anbar province that covers most of western Iraq. Three car-bomb factories were found in Karabilah where fighting was concentrated, the US military said, along with weapons and foreign passports.
At least 13 people were killed in separate incidents across Iraq yesterday as a spate of car bomb attacks on security forces and civilians clouded anti-insurgent successes including the discovery of three car bomb “factories”. In the northern city of Tuz, five Iraqi soldiers were killed and seven people were injured in two suicide car attacks, a security report said. The report from the joint coordination office in Tikrit said one car targeted an Iraqi army checkpoint on the Tuz-Tikrit road, killing one soldier and wounding two others. Fifteen minutes later, a second car bomb targeted an Iraqi army patrol on the same road, killing four soldiers including a lieutenant and wounding one soldier and four civilians.
“A total of 17 car bombs were located, including a tractor trailer, a dump truck and van rigged with explosives, which were destroyed in place by a Marine tank unit.”
