The renewed violence came as Iraq moved closer to forming its first freely elected government in half a century amid growing calls for the departure of US troops who invaded the country in March 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein.

Prime minister-designate Ibrahim Jaafari's government could be in place by the end of the week, officials said. A US contractor, meanwhile, was abducted from a reconstruction work site located in the vicinity of Baghdad, a US embassy spokesman said.

"I can confirm it happened today about noon," the spokesman said. Around 200 foreigners have been taken hostage in Iraq since last April when separate Shiite and Sunni uprisings shook the country and insurgents and criminals started to use kidnapping as a political and financial tool.

Insurgents mounted a brazen attack Monday in the restive western Anbar province, the latest in a string of head-on assaults against the Americans. Three US Marines were wounded when three suicide bombers, one of them driving a fire truck, set off their charges outside Camp Gannon, a forward operating base in the city of Qaim in western Iraq, the US military said.

Following the explosions, gunmen in another vehicle opened fire on the camp prompting troops to call in a Cobra attack helicopter that destroyed the car, said the military, killing two gunmen inside. A local hospital said it received three wounded Iraqis from the clashes after the blasts, which was later claimed in an Internet statement by the group of Al Qaeda's frontman in Iraq, Abu Mussab Zarqawi. Qaim, where insurgents are suspected of regularly crossing into Iraq from Syria, is the site of frequent clashes between rebels and US forces. It lies about 300 kilometres west of Baghdad in restive Anbar province.

Despite a massive US-led assault on the former rebel bastion of Fallujah in November, the Iraqi government has been unable to re-assert control over Anbar, a stronghold of Islamist fighters and Saddam loyalists. A US official said the attack was in line with a new strategy by the insurgency's extremists to rally Sunni Arabs with a dramatic strike against the Americans and to deter them from joining the political process.

The Qaim attack followed a similar rebel assault last week by between 40 and 60 fighters on the US-run Abu Ghraib prison with two car bombs, rockets and small arms fire that wounded 44 US soldiers and a dozen detainees. That operation was also claimed by Zarqawi.

In another rebel strike on Monday, three civilians were killed and 26 others wounded Monday night in a suicide car bombing targeting a US convoy in the insurgency bastion of Samarra, a medical source and witnesses said.

The wounded included five children and a woman, a doctor said. In Baghdad, more than 500 Iraqi forces, backed by US troops, launched a predawn raid in the southeastern Rashid district arresting 65 suspected insurgents. The US army said the detainees belonged to a "terrorist organisation."

In other unrest, a Turkish truck driver was killed in a roadside bombing near the northern refinery town of Baiji, police said, while an Iraqi Kurdish engineer working with the US military was kidnapped in Balad, his family and police said. Also in northern Iraq, an Iraqi bomb disposal expert, Lieutenant Mohammad Salih Talab, was killed on his way to work near Mosul, the US military said.

In Baquba northeast of Baghdad, about 400 university students chanted anti-US slogans and burnt an American flag at a demonstration against the US troop presence, following Saturday's massive protest in Baghdad by supporters of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr. "No, no Jews, (Prophet) Mohammad's army will return!" chanted the students. On the political front, Iraq's parliament met amid tight security to discuss internal procedures and to add some order to its often chaotic sessions. Vice President Ghazi Yawer said a government headed by prominent Shiite leader Jaafari could be in place by the end of the week.

President Jalal Talabani and Jaafari have indicated they are mulling some form of amnesty for the insurgency, but a US State Department official warned Monday Washington did not think amnesty should be granted to the killers of US and Iraqi soldiers. In Islamabad, the Pakistani government said embassy official Malik Muhammad Javed who was abducted in Baghdad on Saturday was safe and that it was sending an envoy to negotiate his release. It added the motive for the kidnapping may be money.

As the hostage-taking epidemic continued to rage, Bucharest said that three Romanian journalists taken hostage on March 28 in Iraq were still alive. The three were kidnapped along with their Iraqi-American guide.

Tuesday, April 12, 2005
the Jordan Times