- (AFP) -- The US-led coalition said that two more American
soldiers were killed in Iraq while an attack on a convoy claimed the first
Polish fatality as strikes on coalition troops showed no sign of abating.
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- One of the US soldiers was killed Thursday near Husaybah,
on the border with Syria, 335 kilometers (210 miles) west of Baghdad.
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- The other soldier died and two more were wounded Wednesday
evening when assailants fired rocket-propelled grenades and small arms
at a US convoy near Mahmudiyah, 30 kilometers (20 miles) south of Baghdad,
the coalition said.
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- The deaths raised to 142 the number of US troops killed
in combat since May 1, when Washington declared major hostilities over.
During the main, six-week offensive before that date, 114 Americans died
from hostile fire.
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- A Polish officer was also killed Thursday after an attack
on a military convoy, the military said.
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- "At 12:00 pm (0900 GMT) one Polish soldier was seriously
wounded by small arms fire on a military convoy 40 kilometers (25 miles)
northeast of Karbala," a Shiite pilgrimage town in central Iraq, a
coalition officer told AFP.
-
- "The soldiers in the convoy returned fire and the
wounded soldier was immediately taken to a military hospital, but he died
as a result of his wounds," he said.
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- Poland commands a 9,000-strong multinational force patrolling
a large swathe of central and southern Iraq and has 2,500 soldiers in the
country, the fourth largest military contingent after the United States,
Britain and Italy.
-
- In Madrid, it was announced that Spanish Foreign Minister
Ana Palacio, whose country strongly backed the US invasion and has sent
troops to Iraq, would head for Baghdad at the weekend.
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- A foreign ministry spokesman said Palacio would assess
the security situation in Iraq just days after Madrid announced it was
withdrawing embassy staff.
-
- Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar and Palacio insisted
on Tuesday that the withdrawal of the bulk of Spain's embassy staff was
temporary and that they were being recalled for "consultations"
-- but opposition parties and the media see the move as an admission the
situation in Iraq is spiraling out of control.
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- Britain's special representative in Iraq, Jeremy Greenstock,
told Thursday's edition of London's Times newspaper that coalition forces
face a "rough winter on the security front" following a recent
surge of violence against occupying troops.
-
- "Terrorists" are trying to make Iraq ungovernable
and choosing their targets cleverly, Greenstock said.
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- "They want to try and close Baghdad down and make
it look as though Iraq can't work with coalition forces here."
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- Greenstock said the US-led coalition had to "earn
time" from an increasingly skeptical local population and "Iraqicise"
the security operation as quickly as possible to make Iraqis the "acceptable
face of security".
-
- Senior defense officials in Washington said the Pentagon
was preparing to rotate its forces in Iraq next year, amid plans to cut
back US troop numbers to 100,000 while Iraqi security forces increase in
size.
-
- US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed orders to
set in motion a force rotation next year that will send back US Marines
along with active duty army and national guard and reserve units, a senior
defense official said Wednesday.
-
- The rotation would involve the replacement of the bulk
of the 132,000 US troops now in Iraq and will include some 35,000 to 45,000
national guard and reservists, said the official, who spoke on condition
of anonymity.
-
- US civil rights leader Reverend Jesse Jackson on Thursday
slammed his government's war on Iraq as having "no moral foundation"
and warned of looming global crises and a cycle of violence brought on
by US arrogance.
-
- The renowned black rights leader and former presidential
candidate said there was "no future, no growth, no prosperity"
in the violence killing US soldiers and Iraqi civilians, and stressed the
war merely invites "blowback" on the American people.
-
- "The world believed that this war was about oil,
not terrorism; about payback, not regime change; about destroying Saddam
Hussein rather than destroying the weapons of mass destruction; about empire,
not democracy," Jackson said in a speech at Bangkok's Thammasat University.
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- Meanwhile, the US-installed governor of Najaf resigned
Thursday, a day after launching a strike to protest the coalition's failure
to provide security in the central Iraqi city where a judge was shot dead.
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- "I resign because some circles believe that others
could be better at the job and because a large part of the population of
Najaf does not understand the interim situation we are passing through,"
said Haidar Mehdi Matar al-Mayyali.
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- "The people want a lot -- and now -- and our capabilities
are limited," he told local leaders.
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- All public offices and courts in Najaf answered the strike
call, and on Thursday they were all still shut except for police stations,
hospitals and schools.
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- In northern Iraq, police said an Iraqi interpreter working
for US forces was wounded Thursday when assailants fired at a checkpoint
manned by coalition soldiers and Iraqi police south of Kirkuk.
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