U.S. Soldiers Killed near Mosul, Iraqi Council Fails to Choose a President

21/07/2003| IslamWeb

Two soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division were killed and another wounded early Sunday when their convoy came under rocket-propelled grenade and small arms fire in northern Iraq, the U.S. military said. All three soldiers were rushed to a nearby military hospital, where two of them died, said Corp. Todd Pruden, a spokesman for the military in Baghdad. The attack took place near Tal Afar, just west of the northern city of Mosul and about 240 miles northwest of Baghdad, Pruden said. There were no reported enemy casualties and no arrests were made. Most of the recent attacks were occurred in an area north and west of Baghdad. Mosul is north of Baghdad and has not been the site of much previous violence. As casualties mounted, the commander of coalition troops in Iraq said Saturday his forces were studying each attack carefully. "We learn from every engagement in order to learn to beat the enemy. Clearly, we are fighting and we expect that this will continue for a while," Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez told reporters. **Attack Attempt against US Convoy in Iraq*** Unidentified attackers attempted an armed attack against a US military convoy on Saturday en route from Heith to Ramady, using a car loaded with explosives. The bombed vehicle was detonated minutes before the US convoy passed the spot, and therefore it inflicted no losses against the US forces. Yet the military convoy, fearing that there might be other similar explosions ahead stopped its proceeding and started a vast search for other bombs or terrorists. Also in Baghdad on Saturday, there was night in a relatively heavy fire exchange between the US forces and resistance fighters in Meqdadiya region of Iraq's Dayali Province on Saturday, five of the US military personnel and the attackers got killed. The foreign dispatches have confirmed the death of at least one other US soldier in Iraq on Saturday as the resistance showed no sign of slowing down and a UN report urged the US-led coalition to set out a timetable to end its occupation. A soldier was killed in a pre-dawn rocket-propelled grenade and small arms attack in a wealthy Baghdad neighborhood, a military spokesman said. The attack followed the killing of another US soldier Friday in an explosion targeting his light armored vehicle near Fallujah, a trouble spot for the Americans in west of Baghdad. **Iraqi Council Fails to Choose a President*** Iraq's American-picked administration failed in its first week to choose a president, abandoning that mission in favor of a weak, three-man rotating leadership. The top US official in Iraq - who hand-picked the Governing Council - returned to Washington while a resistance attack killed yet another American soldier Saturday. The council, agonizingly shepherded into existence by Paul Bremer, the US administrator for Iraq, was announced last Sunday, saying its first order of business was the election of a president. When that did not happen after six days in session, officials of the Iraqi government told the media on Saturday that it would share the leadership job among at least three of 25 members. A Western diplomat who works closely with the council said the decision to establish a rotating presidency did not reflect political divisions among members of the governing body, whom, he said, were cooperating well despite their religious and ethnic differences. The diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the move to a joint presidency meant the job would be largely symbolic. The move clearly reflected unwillingness among council members to vest too much authority in any one of them. **Washington Turns to UN*** Facing daily guerrilla attacks, Washington may turn to the United Nations to try to persuade countries to send soldiers or share costs, running at around 4 billion US dollars a month, diplomats said. The State Department said Washington was open to giving the UN a bigger role in Iraq, especially if other governments respond by offering more to peacekeeping and reconstruction. "We're open to this prospect. We're indeed talking about it with other people, but at this point I can't draw to a conclusion," spokesman Richard Boucher said. In his first major report on postwar Iraq, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Iraqis did not want democracy imposed by outsiders and rated lawlessness as their main concern. **PHOTO CAPTION*** The body of a dead U.S. Army soldier is covered with a plastic sheet after an attack on a highway leading west from the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, July 16, 2003. REUTERS/Akram Saleh