BAGHDAD, 4 August 2004 — Fresh violence flared in Iraq yesterday as four US soldiers, three national guardsmen and a police chief were killed. Insurgents blasted a northern oil pipeline, halting limited exports via Turkey.
In Iraq’s hostage-taking saga, Amman said that another Jordanian has been kidnapped, bringing to seven the number of Jordanians held in the strife-torn country.
Kidnappers holding Lebanese businessman Antoine Antoun in Iraq have also been in touch with one of his employees over their conditions for his release, a member of the man’s family said.
A former Lebanese minister, Fawzi Hobeish, said the kidnappers wanted a ransom payment, but he gave no amount. “All the current contacts show there is a ransom demand and that the kidnapping has no political element,” he said.
India said that talks for the release of seven other men working for a Kuwaiti firm, including three Indians, were likely to be successful.
Amid the violence, President Ghazi Al-Yawar reiterated that he wanted US troops to remain in Iraq until the country was stable and able to fend for itself, in an interview published in the Spanish daily El Pais.
“We don’t want them to leave,” Yawar was quoted as saying. “We want the multinational force to stay in Iraq until our defense forces are up and ready.”
Jordan’s King Abdallah told Al-Arabiya satellite channel that he was prepared to send troops to Iraq if Baghdad requested an Arab force to replace US-led multinational forces.
In Baghdad and Mosul, Christians buried the victims of deadly coordinated attacks on five churches Sunday that killed at least 10 people. Three Iraqi national guardsmen were killed when a suicide bomber blew up a car at a checkpoint on a road into the northern city of Baqubah, wounding another six guardsmen, security and hospital sources said.
“A car drove up to the Sabtiyah checkpoint and before the national guardsmen could search it the driver blew up the vehicle,” said police Capt. Sabah Nassif Jassem.
Rescuers also found the remains of a body that appeared to be that of the bomber, less than a week after a massive suicide attack in Baqubah killed 70.
The latest US fatalities, announced by the military yesterday, raised to some 680 the number of American troops killed in combat since the invasion of Iraq was launched in March 2003, according to a Pentagon tally.
Two Marines died of wounds sustained in the volatile Al-Anbar province, while conducting what the American military described as “security and stability operations”.
Another two soldiers were killed in Baghdad late Monday, while yet another Marine died from accidental gunshot wounds in Najaf.
In Baghdad, district police chief Col. Moyad Bashar Al-Shamari was killed on his way to work when his car ran over a makeshift bomb near the Abu Jafaar Al-Mansur Square.
The latest of a string of sabotage attacks, aimed at thwarting Iraq’s efforts to get back on its feet, brought oil exports through the pipeline from the northern fields of Kirkuk to the Turkish port of Ceyhan to a halt.
A bomb planted near a network of pipelines at Al-Fateha, west of Kirkuk, at dawn damaged the main pipeline to Ceyhan and stopped exports, said Nasir Qassim, an official with the state-owned Northern Oil Company.
The road connecting the Kirkuk oil region with the refineries in Beiji was cut off as emergency workers battled to extinguish the raging flames and thick black smoke, which could be seen all the way from the city.
Separately, a French aid group confirmed that four Iraqi employees in the southern city of Samawa were killed while traveling to Najaf. The bodies were found in a cemetery in Najaf on Monday with multiple stab wounds and one of them had his eyes gouged out, a relative said.
In Najaf late Monday, an Iraqi woman was killed and nine other people wounded in clashes between US troops and loyalists of Moqtada Sadr outside the cleric’s home.
A Sadr spokesman accused US troops of seeking to arrest the wanted cleric and of trying to plunge Shiite cities back into chaos following a deadly standoff between Sadr’s militia and US-led forces earlier this year.
— Additional input from agencies
