- The US sought yesterday to defend the two helicopter
pilots who fired seven rockets into a crowd on Sunday killing 13 people
and wounding 41, saying they had come under "well-aimed ground
fire".
This is different from the first statement by the US military claiming
that they had opened fire with rockets in order to prevent a Bradley
fighting
vehicle hit by a bomb from being looted of arms and ammunition.
-
- Col Jim McConville, the head of the First Cavalry
Division's
aviation brigade, said two helicopters armed with heavy machine guns had
swooped over a crowd when they were shot at from near the Bradley. Both
helicopters then attacked.
-
- The US account of the incident in which Mazen al-Tomeizi,
a Palestinian television producer working for al-Arabiya satellite channel
was killed, was contradicted by the film taken by his cameraman at the
moment the rocket struck. There is no sound of firing from the crowd in
the moments before the helicopters attacked.
-
- The US military's accounts of incidents in which it
claims
to have targeted insurgents but only civilians have died are frequently
discredited by Arab television pictures of the incident which US officers
apparently do not watch before issuing statements. At the weekend the US
was claiming to have precisely hit insurgents in Fallujah while Iraqis
were watching pictures on television of an ambulance gutted from the air
in which a driver, paramedic and five patients died.
-
- The war in Iraq continues to escalate with a sharp
increase
in the overall death rate. Three headless bodies were discovered yesterday
on a road north of Baghdad and appeared from tattoos to be Iraqis whose
hands were tied behind their backs.
-
- While insurgents have often beheaded foreign hostages
in their fight against the government and coalition forces, it is not a
tactic usually used against Iraqis, who are more often abducted for
money.
-
- In Ramadi, west of Baghdad, there was an upsurge of
fighting
in which 10 people were killed including two women.
-
- Meanwhile, the US has dashed Iraqi hopes that money would
at last be spent on Iraq's crumbling infrastructure and no longer
squandered
on arms and security services as under Saddam Hussein.
-
- The US State Department has announced it is switching
$3.4bn of US funds from water and power projects. Most of the money will
be reallocated to boosting security and oil output.
-
- "My budget for projects to supply fresh water and
irrigate land has been cut by half from $800m to $400m," complained
Latif Rashid, the Minister of Water Resources yesterday. "People are
going to be very disappointed."
-
- Iraqi power stations are decrepit, often using elderly
equipment for which spare parts are no longer produced, and Iraqis had
expected that 18 months after the US invasion they would get continuous
electricity supplies. Instead many districts in Baghdad get only 14 hours
a day.
-
- Polluted water is one of the chief killers of young
children
but in a city like Basra only 18 per cent of the water supply is
clean.
-
- Marc Grossman, the US Under Secretary of State for
Political
Affairs, said earlier in the week that $1.8bn of the diverted money would
go to recruit 35,000 new Iraqi police officers, 16,000 border guards and
20 additional Iraqi national guard brigades.
-
- It is not clear how much real security the additional
security men will provide. Even aspirant police officers injured by a
massive
car bomb in Haifa Street earlier this week expressed approval of resistance
attacks on US forces. In April, the US military command were horrified
to find the soldiers and police they had trained went home or switched
sides during the Sunni and Shia uprisings.
-
- ©2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd. All rights
reserved
-
- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/
middle_east/story.jsp?story=562235
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