BAGHDAD, 4 March 2004 — Iraqi overseer Paul Bremer announced yesterday a massive increase in border security following the deadly attacks in the Shiite holy city of Karbala and in Baghdad.
Bremer said $60 million had been earmarked to tighten controls on Iraq’s borders and that hundreds more vehicles and security personnel would be deployed to beef up security.
“There are 8,000 border police on duty today and more are on the way,” Bremer said.
“We are adding hundreds of vehicles and doubling border police staffing in selected areas,” he said.
Around 170 people were killed and more than 500 wounded in Tuesday’s bombings in the two cities, the worst attacks in Iraq since the fall of former dictator Saddam Hussein last April.
“Tuesday showed us the dark vision of the evil-doers. They fight to ward off harmony and are happy to take the road to power with the corpses of their innocent victims,” he said.
“The terrorists are dead set against the vision of a democratic Iraq, a vision shared by an overwhelming majority of the Iraqi people.”
Bremer blamed Jordanian Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi, who is suspected of links to the Al-Qaeda network, and said his aim was to provoke sectarian violence between the majority Shiite and the smaller Sunni Muslim communities.
“Zarqawi and like-minded terrorists are in a losing race against time,” he said.
Meanwhile, the top US commander in the region said the United States has intelligence linking Al-Zarqawi to the suicide bombings.
Al-Zarqawi has long been suspected by the United States of orchestrating suicide attacks in Iraq to try to spark a civil war between the country’s Shiite and Sunni communities.
“The level of organization and the desire to cause casualties among innocent worshippers is a clear hallmark of the Zarqawi network, and we have intelligence that ties Zarqawi to this attack,” Gen. John Abizaid, chief of US Central Command, told the US House of Representatives Armed Services Committee. Abizaid also said the United States has information connecting Al- Zarqawi with former officials of Saddam Hussein’s intelligence apparatus.
The United States intercepted a letter last month believed to have been written by Al-Zarqawi to senior Al-Qaeda leadership seeking support for sparking a religious war in the country. It suggested launching attacks against the Shiites in the hopes they would retaliate against the Sunnis, Saddam’s power base. The US government has offered a $10 million reward for information leading to Al-Zarqawi’s capture or death. He is also suspected of plotting the 2002 assassination of an American diplomat in Jordan.
Abizaid said attacks in Iraq by Al-Zarqawi showed he and Osama Bin Laden’s network are the enemies of Islam.
“They have killed more Muslims in the past month than anybody could ever imagine, for no vision other than to cause destruction and to cause civil war to take place in Iraq,” he said.
