BAGHDAD, 26 October 2004 — Bombs and clashes killed 12 Iraqis yesterday in a surge of Ramadan attacks that also claimed the lives of an Estonian and an American soldier. An Interior Ministry official said he had no figures for the violence since the fasting month began 10 days ago but added: “We can’t deny that there has been an increased number of attacks during Ramadan.”
An Estonian soldier was killed and five were wounded in a bomb blast in the Iraqi capital Baghdad, officials said. A roadside bomb killed a US soldier and wounded five in western Baghdad, the US military said. The death brought to 845 the number of US troops killed in action since the start of the Iraq war last year.
In the first attack on their contingent since the end of the war, three Australians were hurt when a car bomb blew up near the Australian Embassy in central Baghdad. The US military said the blast killed three Iraqis and wounded at least six.
Australian troops in Baghdad are engaged in diplomatic protection, not security operations. Australian Defense Force spokesman Brigadier Mike Hannan said in Canberra there were no diplomats traveling with the convoy when the bomb went off. Australia was one of the first nations to join the US-led war in Iraq, sending about 2,000 troops, but it has since scaled down its force to about 920 in and around Iraq.
Although the country has been hit by bombings during Ramadan, the most cold blooded attack came on Sunday. Militants loyal to Al-Qaeda ally Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi shot dead 49 unarmed Iraqi army recruits as they headed home for leave from a base in the northeast.
As violence raged, hundreds of Iraqis demanded the release of British-Iraqi hostage Margaret Hassan, saying she had touched many people with her humanitarian work. Demonstrators, holding up banners and pictures of Hassan outside the Care International office in Baghdad she directed, said Hassan had spent years in Iraq helping the disabled. A group of armed men, including one in a police uniform, seized Hassan on her way to work last Tuesday.
Efforts to pacify Fallujah, Iraq’s most rebellious town, appeared to have suffered a setback yesterday. The chief negotiator for the town said the government had cancelled talks to avert a military assault there. “I was told that the negotiations have been canceled,” Sheikh Khaled Al-Jumaili told Al-Jazeera.
Fighting continued in Iraq’s Sunni Muslim central heartland, the epicenter of opposition to US troops and where it will be most difficult to vote. Five civilians were killed during clashes between US forces and insurgents in the rebellious western city of Ramadi, hospital director Abdul Moneim Aftan said. He blamed their deaths on US snipers.
Nearly 400 tons of powerful explosives that could be used in conventional missiles, or as a trigger for nuclear devices, has disappeared from a military installation in Iraq left unguarded by the US army, the International Atomic Energy Agency said in Vienna yesterday.
The Iraqi Ministry of Science and Technology informed the IAEA of the disappearance of nearly 380 tons of mainly HMX and RDX explosive materiel on Oct. 10, agency spokeswoman Melissa Fleming told AFP, confirming a report in The New York Times.
“It can be used in a nuclear explosion device” as the blast to trigger the chain reaction, she said, adding: “That’s why it was under IAEA verification and monitoring” before the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. The New York Times said the materiel “could produce bombs strong enough to shatter airplanes or tear apart buildings.”
Fleming noted: “From a proliferation standpoint there is a possible application in nuclear weapons, (but) the most immediate concern is the threat of the explosive falling in the wrong hands and being used to commit terrorist acts,” she said.
