IRAQ: Attacks on Soft Targets Rising

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ferry Biedermann

BAGHDAD, Aug 7 2003 (IPS) - Human remains were strewn across the broad thoroughfare in front of the Jordanian embassy in the Iraqi capital after a powerful blast Thursday. The force of the explosion, caused by a car bomb, had blown debris hundreds of metres across the street.

"I was inside to deliver some documents for the World Health Organisation when I heard a loud bang, everything shook and it became dark," said Utba Althakafy, an Iraqi employee of the WHO receiving treatment for his wounds at the Yarmuk hospital. "I stumbled out and saw a lot of dead people on the way."

The blast claimed the lives of at least 11 people, and wounded more than 60. Among the casualties were Iraqi police officers guarding the compound along with Jordanians.

"I went to look for my friend Ahmed Shukri who was waiting for me in the car outside," Althakafy said. "I heard someone call my name, and it was Ahmed but I could not recognise him because he was completely black form the explosion, and bleeding."

The commander of the U.S. forces in Iraq, Gen Ricardo Sanchez, said the attack fitted into a pattern of violent incidents in the country. "It stresses that we have some terrorists here," said Sanchez at a briefing in a building of the coalition provisional council that runs Iraq on behalf of the U.S.-British forces.

"It is something that every one of us in the international community here has to cope with," Sanchez said.

The U.S. commander said that an increasing number of non-military or so- called soft targets had come under attack of late. The explosion at the Jordanian embassy was the biggest attack on a soft target so far, he said.

A number of aid workers and journalists have come under fire recently, and there has been speculation in Baghdad of a shift in the target of attacks. On Wednesday and Thursday, U.S. soldiers also died in attacks after a four-day stretch without deadly casualties.

On Thursday a U.S. patrol was hit by rocket fire in an ambush not far from the centre of town. The U.S. soldiers fired back. At least one soldier and one Iraqi bystander were killed. The night before, Iraqi assailants shot dead two soldiers at a checkpoint in Baghdad.

U.S. soldiers were not the target of the Thursday blast; they do not guard the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad. Gen Sanchez said that none of the embassies receive special protection.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell called his Jordanian counterpart Marwan Moasher to express regret over the bombing. Powell promised to beef up security around the embassy.

Gen Sanchez refused to speculate on the motives of the attackers but others in Baghdad have advanced several theories.

An Iraqi newspaper condemned Jordan Tuesday for giving asylum to two of Saddam Hussein’s three daughters, and accused Jordan of attacking Iraqi nationalists.

"We expected Amman to accept the new realities in Iraq and to cooperate with the current Iraqi leadership," wrote the Al Mouatmer newspaper, which is close to the Iraqi National Congress headed by Ahmed Chalabi.

The newspaper also accused Jordanian authorities of profiting from the regime of Saddam Hussein and keeping billions of dollars of the old regime in their banks.

Others in Baghdad resent Jordan as a country that supported the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq earlier this year. A small number of U.S. troops were stationed in Jordan at the beginning of the war and used it as a launching pad.

The Jordanian position did not diverge that markedly, however, from that of most other neighbouring countries, except Syria.

A member of a leading family in Baghdad linked the attack with Jordan’s refusal to recognise the provisional Iraqi governing council. Moasher said Wednesday that Jordan would not recognise the council, in line with a decision by the Arab League. But Moasher did say that he saw the creation of the council as a step in the right direction.

An employee of the Jordanian embassy said the attack was most likely a result of the embassy refusing visas to Iraqis desperate to leave the country.

There were reports of angry mobs entering the embassy after the bombing, and tearing up portraits of Jordan’s king Abdallah II and his father King Hussein.

Local people gathered outside the bombed embassy said, however, that they had gone into the building to help the injured, but were driven off by a Jordanian guard armed with a machine gun.