BAGHDAD, 12 July 2007 — The US military yesterday said it expected more high-profile attacks from militant group Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which it claimed killed and wounded more than 4,000 people in the past six months. Iraqi Kurds, meanwhile, threatened to vote against a controversial draft oil law, saying the document had undergone key changes that hampered the interests of the northern Kurdish region of Iraq.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq killed or wounded more than 4,000 Iraqis in suicide attacks in the past six months, US military spokesman Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner told reporters yesterday. Bergner said most of these attacks were carried out by foreign-born “terrorists” and that while their numbers are “relatively small ... their effects are very, very devastating on the people of Iraq.” He said 60 to 80 foreigners are brought to Iraq every month by Al-Qaeda in Iraq, a local militant group that sprang up in the wake of the US-led invasion in March 2003 and professes allegiance to the global Jihadi front.
“Al-Qaeda is the principal destabilizing factor targeting the government of Iraq,” Bergner said, in a weekly briefing largely dedicated to Al-Qaeda. Bergner said the US military was expecting the group to “lash out and stage spectacular attacks” following simultaneous military assaults on its networks across Iraq.
The military yesterday announced the killing of another 20 militants of the group in the province of Diyala, northeast of Baghdad. Bergner also confirmed that the US military is helping local armed groups who had vowed to fight the Jihadi group in Iraq.
Aiding such groups was helping coalition forces by way of “having an impact in terms of information they are sharing and helping coalition forces for finding members of the terrorist network,” Bergner added.
Last month, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki warned that attempts to arm Iraqi tribes in fighting Al-Qaeda could create new militias in the future. Ashti Horami, minister for natural resources in the autonomous administration in the northern Kurdish region, yesterday said that the draft oil law had been substantially changed.
“The most significant change is that they (a government committee) have added a clause that says that oil exploration contracts would be decided by the central government,” Horami said at a session in the Parliament of the northern region in Arbil.
Mahmud Othman, a Kurd and lawmaker in Iraq’s embattled Parliament told AFP that the Kurdish political bloc would “vote against the law if such changes are incorporated in the bill.” The draft law was first approved by the Baghdad Cabinet in February but Iraq’s warring Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish factions later demanded certain amendments.
Last week, the amended oil bill — a key plank in efforts to help unite the country’s warring communities — was endorsed by Maliki’s Cabinet and forwarded to the Iraqi parliament for its first reading. The draft, seen by Washington as one of the key factors for ending the sectarian bloodshed in Iraq, lays down control of the country’s oil wealth and how it would be distributed across the communities.
German woman Hannelore Krause held hostage in Iraq since Feb. 6, meanwhile, was freed on Tuesday but her son, Sinan, remained in the hands of the kidnappers, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said yesterday. The kidnappers had threatened to execute both mother and son unless Germany withdrew its troop from Afghanistan.
“I ask Germany to pull its troops out of Afghanistan. If it fails to do so, then my son will be slaughtered,” Krause said in an interview broadcast on Al-Arabiya television yesterday. They were seized from their house in Baghdad by members of a militant Islamist group called the Kataeb Siham Al-Haq (Righteous Arrows Battalions). Krause is married to an Iraqi doctor and settled in Iraq some 40 years ago.
Iraqi security forces yesterday seized 200 suicide bomb belts and other explosives in a truck that entered Iraq from Syria, said the Interior Ministry’s director of operations, Maj. Gen. Abdel Karim Khalaf. At least two people were killed and seven children wounded when a US helicopter opened fire after coming under attack yesterday in the northern city of Mosul, the US military said.
