17 Injured in New Attacks on Troops

17/09/2003| IslamWeb

Thirteen Iraqis and four coalition soldiers were wounded in attacks on occupying forces in Iraq, the US military said yesterday but added that there had been fewer strikes over recent days. Three US soldiers were wounded in separate attacks near the central town of Fallujah and the northern city of Mosul, witnesses and the US military said. One soldier was injured in the village of Amiriyah, 35km south of the hot spot town of Fallujah, when a mine exploded yesterday afternoon as a three-vehicle American convoy passed, said local resident Amer Ali. Another US soldier was wounded in Mosul in an attack with an explosive device and small arms, and a third was hurt in the same city in an assault an hour later, said spokeswoman Sergeant Amy Abbott. Lieutenant Colonel George Krivo, the chief coalition military spokesman, told a news conference yesterday that troops had conducted 2,159 patrols, 15 raids and detained 67 people over the previous 24 hours. US officials also said they were holding 10,000 prisoners in Iraq, nearly double the number previously reported, and count among the security cases six inmates claiming to be Americans and two who say they are British. Some 4,400 were classified as security detainees, including around 3,800 who did not previously "fit into any category," said Brigadier General Janis Karpinski. Previous figures given by the US military had put the total number of prisoners at between 5,000 and 5,500. Several hundred third-country nationals were among the prisoners held on security grounds since Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was overthrown in April by US and British forces, she added. The vast majority of these were captured during the war, she said, while only a "negligible" number had been detained since major combat operations were declared over on May 1. Former U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix believes Iraq destroyed its weapons of mass destruction 10 years ago and that intelligence agencies were wrong in their weapons assessment that led to war. In an interview with Australian radio from Sweden, Blix said the search for evidence of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons would probably only uncover documents at best. "The more time that has passed, the more I think it's unlikely that anything will be found," Blix said in the interview, which was broadcast on Wednesday. "I'm certainly more and more to the conclusion that Iraq has, as they maintained, destroyed almost all of what they had in the summer of 1991," Blix said. In 1991, the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) found what it called a secret nuclear weapons program in Iraq. It spent the next seven years dismantling Baghdad's nuclear capability, until its inspectors were thrown out of Iraq. Before ordering the invasion that toppled President Saddam Hussein, President Bush referred to an imminent threat posed by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as a prime justification for war. "In the beginning they talked about weapons concretely, and later on they talked about weapons programs...maybe they'll find some documents of interest," Blix said. Blix spent three years searching for Iraqi chemical, biological and ballistic missiles as head of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission. U.N. inspectors left Iraq in March this year as American and British forces prepared to invade. Calls for their reinstatement have been denied, with the U.S. occupation authorities preferring instead to set up their own body, the Iraq Survey Group. After more than five months of searching, no weapons of mass destruction have been found by the Iraq Survey Group, which consists of about 1,500 experts. **PHOTO CAPTION*** US soldier plays baseball in one of the palaces of ousted Iraqi president in Tikrit, about 110 miles northwest of Baghdad, September 16, 2003. (REUTERS/Arko Datta)