Gunmen Kill Police Chief in Iraq
BAGHDAD, Iraq – Gunmen killed a police chief and another officer early Friday in Iraq, and thousands of Shiite Muslims slept on the streets of the holy city of Karbala for fear of traveling at night after a string of attacks on pilgrims.
Gunmen killed Balad Ruz police chief Col. Hatim Rashid as he was visiting a police station in the city, said Col. Mudhafar al-Jubouri, a provincial police official. A police officer was also killed and another was injured in the attack, 30 miles northeast of Baghdad.
In Karbala, bus stations were packed with pilgrims departing after a Shiite religious holiday marking the end of a 40-day mourning period for Imam Hussein, one of Shiites’ most important saints.
Fighters from the Sunni Muslim-led insurgency staged several deadly attacks on Shiite pilgrims in the days leading up to religious festival. In the latest attack, a suicide car bomber blew himself up Thursday near an Islamic shrine in Tuz Khormato, 55 miles south of Kirkuk. Five Iraqis were killed and 16 were wounded, hospital officials said.
Ukraine and Italy announced timelines to pull troops from Iraq later this year. Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko said his country’s 1,650 troops will leave by year’s end. Ukraine has the fifth-largest contingent in the coalition.
Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi said he plans to trim Italy’s contingent of 3,300 troops by 300 at the end of September.
In Romania, which has 800 soldiers in Iraq, Prime Minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu refused to say whether he would consider withdrawing his country’s troops after kidnappers released a video showing three Romanian journalists who were abducted in Baghdad.
The video, aired by Al-Jazeera satellite television, showed the three Romanian journalists and a fourth unidentified person – possibly an American – with guns pointed at them. Tariceanu said no demands had been made yet.
U.S. forces have intensified programs to train more troops in the Iraqi Army and police force, hoping to stabilize the country with native forces.
In other violence Thursday, a suicide bomber exploded his car next to a U.S. military Humvee in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, killing three people and wounding more than a dozen, hospital officials said. There were no U.S. casualties, the U.S. military said.
The U.S. military reported three U.S. soldiers killed in separate clashes, bringing the number of American military deaths in March to 33 – the lowest monthly death toll since 20 were killed in February 2004.
In Washington, a presidential commission issued a report saying U.S. spy agencies were “dead wrong” in most of their judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction before the 2003 war.
Monqedh Fathi Abdel Razzaq, an engineer who was an Iraqi army officer in Saddam Hussein’s ousted regime, welcomed the report, but said that “the war has already taken place, and what happened, happened.”
“America is a superpower and all, but at the end of the day it’s not God,” he said. “It makes mistakes.”
A U.S. defense official also announced Thursday that U.S. forces in Iraq were holding a senior operative of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who holds joint American-Jordanian citizenship. The man, who was described as a personal associate of Zarqawi and an emissary to insurgents, was captured in late 2004.