BAGHDAD, 1 November 2003 — Another day of violence and rioting yesterday saw four Iraqis and a US soldier killed and at least 20 Iraqi civilians and two American soldiers injured.
The crowd in the capital’s western suburb of Abu Ghraib was whipped into frenzy by the father of a six-year-old boy who was crushed by a US tank. US troops had entered the marketplace looking for those responsible for a grenade attack earlier that wounded two soldiers, witnesses said.
“An American tank crushed a car killing... the child who was inside,” said stall owner Nabil Abbas. The boy’s father alerted people who were just leaving mosques after Friday prayers. The crowd burned tires, and shot at and hurled rocks at US troops and Iraqi police, Abbas said.
“The police tried to contain the protest, the protesters opened fire and a policeman was killed,” said police Maj. Mussa Lazem.
US troops fired back at the crowd. “The US soldiers fired blindly on the demonstrators. They killed three Iraqi civilians,” said Abbas Jassim, a medic. “Soldiers machine-gunned the demonstrators,” said Hassan Emad Abdallah, 63. “There are still some charred bodies in the stalls that burned down,” merchant Mahfouz Ali said.
Farther west in Fallujah, a center of the anti-US resistance, an explosion and fire struck the office of the mayor, who has cooperated with the US occupation. In a melee that followed, one Iraqi was killed, and later Friday US troops came under attack at the same spot.
An association of Islamic clerics, meanwhile, issued a statement denouncing as sinful any Muslim’s support for the Americans. “Supporting them is apostasy,” it said, “... a betrayal of religion.”
Rumors spread through Baghdad that bombings or other resistance action would strike the capital today. A street leaflet attributed to the ousted Baathists declared it would be “the day of establishing the Iraqi resistance,” and also called for a three-day general strike to begin today.
