- BAGHDAD -- Thirteen days
after the United States military launched a flamboyant operation to smash
Iraq's guerrillas by using fighter jets, Apache attack helicopters and
500lb satellite-guided warheads, the resistance delivered their reply yesterday.
They fired rockets into two prestigious Baghdad hotels and the Iraqi Oil
Ministry from donkey-drawn carts.
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- Although crude and unsophisticated, the rockets achieved
much of what their planners must have wished for. They won worldwide headlines
and a place in the history of this deteriorating conflict as one of the
more brazen acts of defiance by the pro-Saddam die-hards, anti-American
nationalists, discharged soldiers and religious zealots who are thought
largely to make up the Iraqi resistance.
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- The rocket attacks took place under the muzzle of American
guns in the centre of the capital, a city that they are supposed to have
brought under their control nearly seven months ago. Their targets included
one of the most renowned and fortified landmarks, the Palestine hotel,
an 18-storey monolith from which the world's television stations covered
the invasion and fall of the capital. It continues to house Western contractors
and the media, including ITN, Associated Press and CNN, and is used by
Allied officials.
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- Only three of five armed donkey carts deployed in Baghdad
yesterday fired their payloads. Two other donkey-hauled rocket launchers
were later discovered.
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- One was close to the Italian embassy, which is still
mourning the loss of 19 Italians in a suicide bombing in Nasiriyah earlier
this month, and the Turkish embassy, whose diplomats are still digesting
the security consequences of the latest bombings in Istanbul. It was laden
with 21 rockets.
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- The other was near the city's Academy of Arts.
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- The purpose of the operation appears to have been, in
part, to puncture claims by the American occupying forces, publicly made
only a day earlier by the US commander in the capital, Brigadier General
Martin Dempsey, of the 1st Armoured Division, that they are making headway
in crushing resistance cells in Baghdad. Probably by chance, the assault
also coincided with a conference on "Saddam's terrorists" at
the Palestine. This was postponed.
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- Eight rockets, propelled from a street a few hundred
yards away, blasted five holes in the faÁade of the Palestine hotel,
hitting the 8th, 12th and 15th floors. Two people were hurt, one badly.
"There was a tremendously loud explosion," said Timothy Mills,
a writer for Dow Jones whose room was on the 15th floor and who was close
to where rockets landed. "I thought there had been a car bomb outside.
I hit the floor and waited for the next one."
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- The noise of the explosions triggered a rush to the scene
from the photographers and cameramen among the hotel guests. This was not
the first time such scenes have taken place: on 9 April, two cameramen
were killed when an American tank fired on it.
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- One of the rockets fired towards the hotel yesterday
hit the nearby Sheraton, which shares the same compound. Both have, for
months, been ringed by razor wire, 12ft-high concrete blocks and military
checkpoints. One of the missiles hit one of the Sheraton's external lift
shafts, cutting the cables on one of the elevators, which crashed to the
ground.
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- There were no injuries reported at the Oil Ministry complex,
the nerve-centre of the country's crucial petro- chemicals industry and
to American plans for the country's reconstruction. The building was largely
unoccupied because it was a Friday, the Muslim sabbath.
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- The events were considered sufficiently serious to merit
a rise in oil prices: Brent crude in London jumped 32 cents to $29.88 a
barrel.
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- Colonel Peter Mansoor of the 1st Armoured Division said
that the assault on the Palestine hotel bore a close resemblance to the
attack on the Rashid hotel, which was pounded by rockets while the American
deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the
American and British occupation of Iraq, was inside.
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- * A Hungarian civilian working in Iraq was shot and killed
at a military checkpoint by American soldiers. US troops shot Peter Varga-Balazs,
27, on Monday after he drove towards a checkpoint in Ramadi. His car then
crashed into an American military Humvee, injuring several soldiers.
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- © 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=466125
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