BAGHDAD, 7 July 2003 — A US soldier in Iraq to build ties with the community died after he was shot at Baghdad University yesterday in the latest in a string of increasingly bold attacks on occupying forces.
The US military said the victim of yesterday’s shooting in Iraq was one of its Civil Affairs soldiers, who wear regular combat gear but specialize in helping with community projects. Students said he had been inside the university campus in the south of the city, and that a US military helicopter had taken him to hospital. US troops sealed off the campus.
One student, Abdullah Saad, said he saw the soldier on the ground, bleeding from a head wound. He received a “hostile” gunshot wound and died later of his injuries, the military said. On Saturday, a British freelance cameraman, Richard Wild, was also shot dead at close range in central Baghdad, and seven recruits to a US-backed local police force were killed by a remote-controlled bomb in Ramadi, west of the capital.
The series of attacks cast a pall over efforts by the US-led administration to restore security nearly three months after Baghdad fell to coalition forces. With efforts focused on building democratic institutions in Iraq, UN special representative Sergio Vieira de Mello told reporters that top US civil administrator Paul Bremer had agreed to the setting up of a “transitory governing council.”
Saturday’s bombing in the town of Ramadi, some 100 kilometers west of Baghdad, which claimed the lives of seven police recruits, followed threats against Iraqis cooperating with the US-led coalition, residents said. It also came after the broadcast of a tape purporting to be of Saddam praising those carrying out strikes on coalition forces.
Military officials have previously said the wave of attacks could be in response to a series of raids coalition forces are carrying out in a mostly Sunni Muslim belt considered Saddam’s former heartland north of the capital. That sweep, designed to snare militia fighters and diehard Saddam loyalists, has in the past week netted 282 individuals suspected of ties to the ousted Baath Party regime, the US military said.
