BAGHDAD, 26 September 2003 — UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan yesterday ordered more UN international staff out of Iraq as a member of Iraq’s US-appointed Governing Council died of wounds suffered in an ambush last week and seven civilians were killed in a mortar attack.
Police Lt. Abbas Khodeir said the mortar hit a crowded square of Baquba, 70 km from here, around 9 p.m. He could not say who fired it.
A bomb damaged a hotel housing the offices of NBC News, raising fears of attacks against international media. A Somali guard was killed and an NBC sound engineer was slightly injured in the early morning explosion at the small Al-Aike Hotel in Baghdad’s fashionable Karrada district.
In the north, eight American soldiers were wounded — three of them seriously — when their convoy was ambushed with roadside bombs and small arms fire in a western district of Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city. The commander of US forces in Iraq warned he would use whatever force necessary to defeat those who attack American soldiers.
The tenuous security situation prompted Annan to order a further reduction in UN international staff in Iraq following two bombings at UN headquarters, including one on Aug. 19 that killed 22 people.
Annan’s spokesman Fred Eckhard said the withdrawal began earlier yesterday and would leave the world body with just a fraction of the roughly 650 international staff it had in Iraq before last month’s attack.
“Today, there remain 42 (staff) in Baghdad and 44 in the north of the country, and those numbers can be expected to shrink over the next few days,” Eckhard said.
Akila Al-Hashimi, one of three women on the 25-member Governing Council and the leading candidate to become Iraq’s ambassador to the United Nations, died in a US military hospital five days after she was ambushed by six men in a pickup truck on a street near her Baghdad home. She was to have attended the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York this week.
The US military yesterday cleared its troops of any wrongdoing in a shooting earlier this month that left nine Iraqi security men and a Jordanian guard dead from US fire in Fallujah.
It also exonerated its men over an incident in Baghdad, where troops were accused of shooting dead two Iraqi policemen, one of whom was trying to surrender to them, and beating a third.
