BAGHDAD Insurgents Use Rockets on Donkey Carts to Hit Sites in Iraqi Capital

November 22, 2003
By JOHN F. BURNSThe New York

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 21 - Faced with an American military crackdown using all the paraphernalia of high-technology warfare, Iraqi insurgents resorted today to the humblest of creatures and the simplest of transports to carry out what American officers called "spectacular" strikes against heavily fortified targets in Baghdad.The attackers used four donkey carts disguised as hay wagons to haul homemade multiple rocket-launchers close to several of the most heavily defended sites in the city, including the 20-story Palestine and Sheraton hotels on the banks of the Tigris River, and the Oil Ministry, which manages the resources on which Iraq's hopes for resurgent oil wealth depend.One American working for Kellogg, Brown and Root, one of the largest American companies involved in reconstruction here, was seriously wounded when his 15th-floor room at the Palestine Hotel took a direct hit. The American military command said the man, who was not identified, was in critical condition with head and chest wounds and would be evacuated to the American military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany.Another donkey cart carrying rockets was spotted by a suspicious shopkeeper and disarmed before it could detonate near the Italian and Turkish embassies and the headquarters of a Kurdish political party in another part of central Baghdad. Yet another donkey cart was found near a law school and an adjacent American military camp farther down the Tigris, with still more rockets under a mound of hay. It, too, was disarmed.American commanders said they had no immediate suspects in the attacks. The donkey carts themselves yielded few clues, beyond the sort of hand-lettered inscriptions that Middle Eastern carters commonly inscribe on their vehicles. "Allah, Muhammad, Ali," one said, invoking the Shiite Muslim trinity of God, the Prophet Muhammad and the Shiites' first imam, Ali.Agence France-Presse reported that one of its reporters had glimpsed a note in broken English clutched by an American officer at the scene of one of the attacks that read, in parts, "To all the forces . . . (specially the Jews . . . American forces) get . . . from our country. Do not . . . let your mother crying."[At least six people were killed Saturday morning in a suspected suicide car-bomb attack on the main police station in the town of Baquba, about 40 miles north of Baghdad, Reuters reported.[The police said a car packed with explosives detonated at around 8 a.m. It was the latest in a series of attacks against the Iraqi police.]Although the attacks fell short of the horror of recent suicide bombings that killed dozens at the United Nations compound and the Red Cross headquarters here, they appeared intended to have maximum psychological impact on Baghdad's increasingly fearful 5.5 million people."These are spectacular attacks," said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, chief spokesman for the United States military command. He described those mounting attacks across Iraq as "an adaptive, ingenious enemy," but said they knew that they could not prevail in a direct confrontation with the 155,000 allied troops, all but 25,000 of them Americans."They realize they can't defeat us in a conventional war," he said. "What they're trying to do is to break our will and grab headlines,"General Kimmitt, who took up his post as a deputy director of operations for the American command earlier this month, said the attacks should be kept in perspective. "We've had some very dramatic attacks in Baghdad, but generally the country is very peaceful," he said.Yet the assaults seemed intended to offer a riposte to American commanders who have claimed that a two-week offensive has enabled them to get on top of groups that have been mounting armed attacks in Baghdad. The rockets soared over fortifications the Americans have built around many key installations in Baghdad, including a double row of 20-foot-high concrete blast walls around the Palestine and Sheraton hotels.Another American general said Thursday that the offensive had reduced the number of attacks across Baghdad by 70 percent in the last two weeks. Given the rising arc of the attacks, recently as many as 50 a day across Iraq, that appeared to mean that the offensive had pushed the attacks in Baghdad back to about where they were before August, when suicide bombings began, signaling a new intensity in the insurgents' strikes.Brig. Gen. Martin Dempsey, commander of the First Armored Division, said at a news conference that the offensive in Baghdad, like others across Iraq that are part of the same crackdown, had relied on an improving flow of intelligence about armed groups loyal to Saddam Hussein.He also emphasized the patient, "precise" use of American high-technology weapons systems like fast, low-flying attack helicopters with advanced night optics and fixed-wing attack aircraft firing satellite-guided bombs and missiles, used in Baghdad in the last 10 days for the first time since American troops captured the city in April.The attacks on Friday offered a taste of how difficult that task is likely to be, given the insurgents' quickness in exploiting any American weakness and their readiness to resort to low-technology tactics that can help them escape detection.The donkeys were tethered to trees, with the rockets inserted inside home-made launchers linked to car batteries and time-fuses, and hidden under hay. But these "contraptions," as one American officer called them, were armed with powerful battlefield rockets. Several feet long and as big around as a fire hose, they were said by American officers to have been either Soviet-made 107-millimeter or Brazilian-made 122-millimeter rockets, two types that were stockpiled by Mr. Hussein's army before the American invasion. They have a range of up to 10 miles.Only luck appeared to have averted far more serious damage. At least 50 of the rockets failed to fire. Those that did struck with great force. Four holes as big as soccer balls were punched in the outer walls of the Palestine Hotel, throwing concrete chunks and glass into three upper floors and filling corridors with thick, grimy dust.At the adjacent Sheraton, a rocket severed the cables of an external, glass-encased elevator and sent it plunging to the ground, smashing the glass roof of the atrium and sending shards showering into the lobby. Miraculously, there were no injuries.An upper floor of the Oil Ministry caught fire, but there were no reported injuries in a building that, unlike the hotels filled with foreign journalists and other outsiders, was virtually deserted at the start of a Muslim prayer day.The United States military command swiftly issued a citywide alert after the attacks. Many carts plying the city's streets, delivering hay, collecting scrap and other loads, then came under stone-throwing attacks and curses from jumpy Iraqis if they lingered anywhere for long.The donkeys, all of which survived, appeared to have played a part in limiting the severity of the attacks.Iraqis who were outside the Palestine Hotel at the time of the attack there said the donkey there had started so violently after the first volley of rockets singed his backside that he upset the cart, toppling the launcher onto its side, spilling the battery onto the street and disrupting the firing mechanism. Outside the Italian Embassy, Iraqis said the donkey there had begun munching on the hay, exposing the rocket launcher before it could fire.