BAGHDAD, 22 October 2003 — A sniffer dog search sparked an anti-US protest in Baghdad and pipelines blazed north of the capital yesterday, after America’s top general said he was unsure if his forces would stay in Iraq beyond next year. Some Iraqis cannot wait for their occupiers to depart.
Oil Ministry employee Zainab Assem said the protest outside a government compound in Baghdad started after a veiled woman refused to let a dog touch her bag, which contained a copy of the Qur’an. “Amal Karim asked them not to let the dog touch her bag because there was a Qur’an inside,” Zainab told AFP.
A US soldier approached and hurled the Muslim holy book to the ground, she said. “Amal started shouting: ‘Can you let American soldiers desecrate our holy Qur’an?’ And the crowd broke out in rage.”
“Down, down USA,” shouted thousands of government employees angered by the detention of the woman. Soldiers fired shots in the air to disperse the workers from the Oil Ministry and nearby ministries.
“I have been coming here for 27 years and now they (Americans) are searching us with dogs. We are Muslims,” Saadiya Ahmad, an Oil Ministry engineer said. “We don’t just want the dogs to leave. We want the dogs who are holding the dogs to leave, every last one of them,” said one employee, Nazir Mohammed.
A man who gave his name as Sabeeh said troops had handcuffed a woman employee and made her stand in the sun for an hour because she had refused the search. Sniffer dogs are routinely used to search for explosives at government ministries to guard against bomb attacks.
In the north, pipelines that feed a Baghdad refinery and power station were ablaze, a day after a sabotage attack. Iraqi Lt. Col. Khalid Mohammed Rashid, who works for a force protecting key installations, said an explosion had set fire to four pipelines just south of the Baiji oil refinery, 190 km north of Baghdad. “What happened was sabotage,” he said, adding that one of the pipelines takes gas to Baghdad’s Daura refinery, while the two oil pipelines feed a power plant in the city.
A fourth carries liquefied petroleum gas. Baiji, north of ousted President Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit and the scene of past sabotage attacks, is the site of a refinery that receives crude via a pipeline from Iraq’s Kirkuk oilfields.
Sabotage has hit efforts to revive the oil industry, while guerrillas have killed 104 US soldiers since Washington declared major combat over on May 1. “They (terrorists) are accustomed to the US backing down,” Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told 1,500 Marines at a base in California on Monday.
“They think they can break our will,” Myers said. “There will be a demand on our armed forces for some time to come. I don’t know if it will go to 2005. We just don’t know that.” Another officer, Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, commander of the 3rd Corps, said in Iraq on Friday US troops might need to stay until 2006.
US forces have faced most resistance in Sunni Muslim areas north and west of Baghdad, but unrest has also been growing within Iraq’s long-oppressed Shiite majority. In the Shiite holy city of Kerbala, US-led forces said they had secured the surrender at midnight of armed men who had taken refuge in a mosque after clashes with a rival Shiite group last week.
“They peacefully surrendered,” a military spokesman, Capt. Ivan Morgan, said. “They (security forces) went there and gave them an ultimatum, a deadline, and about 15 minutes later they surrendered.” More than a score of fighters loyal to radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr had fled to the mosque after an Oct. 13 clash with supporters of Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani.
Violence is providing an uncertain backdrop to a two-day donors’ conference on Iraq due to start in Madrid tomorrow. Spain hopes the event will underline international support for Iraq and raise a good part of the $56 billion estimated cost of rebuilding the country.
Meanwhile, Washington looks likely to drop its request that Turkey send troops to Iraq to back up harried US forces, a decision that could be something of a relief for the Ankara government, Turkish officials and analysts say. Turkey’s troop offer, sanctioned by Parliament this month, has provoked strong protest both inside and outside Iraq and is deeply unpopular with the Turkish public.
