BAGHDAD, 24 August 2003 — Three British soldiers were shot dead yesterday in the southern port of Basra, further destabilizing Iraq even as the United Nations returned to work for the first time since the deadly bombing of its Baghdad headquarters.
The attack cast a pall over a new US effort to persuade more countries to send troops to Iraq as it seeks relief for its own beleaguered soldiers, bogged down in a low-level war with a host of guerrilla fighters, ranging from radicals to loyalists of Saddam Hussein.
US civil administrator Paul Bremer warned that Iraq had become one of the battlefields in the US-declared war on terror, in the aftermath of Tuesday’s suicide attack on the UN building in Baghdad that killed 23 people and wounded more than 100.
“It is now unfortunately the case that Iraq has become one of the fields of battle in this global war” on terror, Bremer told reporters. His comments came shortly after President George W. Bush vowed in a hard-hitting weekly radio address that the United States would target radical groups anywhere in the world.
“The terrorists have declared war on every free nation and all our citizens,” he said. “Their goals are clear. They want more governments to resemble the oppressive Taleban that once ruled Afghanistan.”
Bush added that “from Afghanistan to Iraq, to the Philippines and elsewhere, we are waging a campaign against the terrorists and their allies, wherever they gather, wherever they plan, and wherever they act.
“Iraq is an essential front in this war,” he added. The president said that progress being made by the US-led coalition in Iraq to rebuild a stable country “makes the remaining terrorists even more desperate and willing to lash out against symbols of order and hope, like coalition forces and UN personnel.” But the coalition’s troubles mounted yesterday when three British military policemen were shot dead by unknown assailants in Basra.
Witnesses and a British major initially said that as many as four Iraqi civilians had also been wounded when the troops came under fire. But an army spokesman later said he knew nothing of any civilian casualties.
The soldiers, driving a Ford four-wheel drive, were ambushed by gunmen in a white Toyota flatbed truck near the old British cemetery, said street seller Sabir Naama.
“The driver was hit and lost control of the vehicle, hitting an Iraqi woman and two children. He then slammed into a building,” said Naama.
The soldiers came under a hail of bullets, with only the driver still alive when British troops pulled them out of the smashed-up, bloodstained vehicle, Naama said.
The deaths brought to 10 the number of British soldiers killed in Iraq since Washington declared major combat over on May 1.
They came nine days after a remote-controlled bomb killed a British soldier in Basra. The latest deaths combined with two days of rioting in Basra this month have badly dented British hopes of avoiding in their sector the cycle of violence afflicting Baghdad and surrounding regions.
Neither were the British safe in Baghdad where the country’s diplomats were evacuated from their embassy compound a day after the UN bombing amid rumors of an attack.
Around 200 UN workers meanwhile returned to work in Baghdad yesterday, four days after the suicide bombing at their Canal Hotel headquarters.
The body of UN envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello, killed in the blast, arrived in the Brazilian diplomat’s hometown of Rio de Janeiro yesterday as his staff vowed not to flee Iraq in the face of the worst attack in UN history. Picking up the pieces, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has named Ramiro Lopes da Silva as interim top United Nations official in Iraq.
In a sign of further unrest in Iraq, three ethnic Turkmen were shot dead by police in the northern oil-rich city of Kirkuk yesterday after they opened fire on a police building during a demonstration, Governor Abdul Rahman Mustafa told reporters. The killings came a day after fighting between Kurds and Turkmen in Tuz Khurmatu.
— Additional input from agencies
