Italy Says Hussein Loyalists Are to Blame for Bombing

November 13, 2003
By JOHN F. BURNS

NASIRIYA, Iraq, Nov. 13 — The Italian defense minister arrived here from Rome today under very tight security, and said there were strong indications that Saddam Hussein loyalists and Al Qaeda terrorists were responsible for a car or truck bomb explosion here on Wednesday that left at least 27 people dead.

The minister, Antonio Martino, told Italian state television that Italy had "fairly reliable intelligence" that the Saddam Fedayeen, the ousted leader's former paramilitary force, was responsible, along with "regrouped Al Qaeda terrorists."

Mr. Martino arrived in a military police helicopter, which circled continually over the bombed site during the minister's visit.

An Italian military ambulance, heavily guarded by trucks in front and behind, left today on the 180-mile trip to Baghdad carrying Italian wounded or dead. Soldiers were extremely jumpy, indicating that traffic in the rear of the ambulance should stay well clear.

Some of the local residents, who fear that the attack might prompt the United States to pull troops out of Iraq and abandon them to the whims of "Saddam's henchmen," began to be moved back into the homes that remain after the blast in the middle-class neighborhood of Zaitoon.

Some sat for several hours at barbed-wire checkpoints manned by Italian forces guarding access to the area. Many continued to express their outrage and distress over the attack. Bandaged women in black cloaks and head coverings, and bandaged men, could be seen in the streets.

The clearing of rubble continued, and coalition investigators were present but said nothing to reporters.

The explosion in the courtyard of an Italian paramilitary police headquarters in this southern Iraqi city on Wednesday killed 18 Italians and at least 9 Iraqis, and wounded more than 105 others. The Iraqi death toll was given on Wednesday by the doctor in charge of the casualty unit at the Nasiriya hospital.

It was the most lethal single attack on forces of the American-led occupation since Mr. Hussein was swept from power in April.

Hours after the blast, American forces launched a pair of ferocious strikes against suspected loyalists of Saddam Hussein's government in Baghdad, signaling a new and more aggressive strategy. Tonight Iraqi time United States forces continued to pound targets in Baghdad.

A British military spokesman, Maj. Charlie Mayo, confirmed today that the number of Italians killed had risen by one, to 18. He also said that it was very difficult to put an exact number on the number of Iraqis who may have died, and said that news agency reports that a total of up to 32 people were killed could not be confirmed.

Major Mayo, the multinational division spokesman based in Basra, said that on occasion many Iraqis who have been wounded in such incidents "aren't necessarily taken to a hospital," or transported by ambulence, adding that is is "therefore extremely difficult to know exactly how many people" are involved.

Major Mayo said his information was being supplied by the Italian military police at the scene, the local police and local residents.

Elsewhere in Iraq, soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division in the northern city of Mosul, in captured 20 people on Tuesday suspected of violence against United States forces, the United States Central Command said today.

The command also said today that a First Armored Division soldier died on Wednesday after being wounded in a roadside bomb explosion in Baghdad.

The Nasiriya bomb exploded at 10:40 a.m. local time on Wednesday, ripping apart the three-story building and an annex that stand beside a broad stretch of the Euphrates river in the center of Nasiriya, 180 miles south of Baghdad. The lightly protected buildings, formerly the city's Chamber of Commerce, served as offices and accommodation for 200 members of the Carabinieri, the Italian military police force, and most were in the buildings at the time of the attack.

"A truck crashed into the entrance of the military police unit, closely followed by a car which detonated," a spokeswoman for the British-led multinational force in southern Iraq said shortly after the blast.

An Iraqi witness said he saw a blue-and-white Russian-built truck approach the building at high speed along a boulevard leading to the river, with a bearded man in the front passenger seat firing at Italian guards before the vehicle swung past the guards and a line of low, earth-filled barriers before exploding.

There were no claims of responsibility for the attack, the latest in a series that have struck at not only Americans but other foreigners and the Iraqis that support them. Earlier targets have included the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Jordanian Embassy.

In Nasiriya, the force of the bombing of the Italian compound left a crater 50 yards from the main building that was more than 50 feet across and 10 feet deep. The front and side of the building was sheered off, with iron beds, desks and other equipment and personal belongings strewn in the wreckage.

Ammunition stored in the building exploded, and vehicles in an adjacent parking lot caught fire, sending a huge plume of flame and smoke curling for hours into the clear autumn air. A wide area around the site was immediately sealed off by Italian and Romanian troops.

Many of the Italians killed and wounded in the attack had been due to head back to Italy at midweek, at the end of a four-month stint.

In addition to the dead, there were 21 Italians among the wounded. At the Nasiriya hospital, doctors said 85 Iraqis had been injured, 30 seriously. They said the dead included three schoolgirls of about 10 who died in a passing minibus, as well as a 10-day-old infant whose mother survived. At least 10 of the injured Iraqis were women and children.

In Rome, Italy's defense minister, Antonio Martino, blamed loyalists of Mr. Hussein for the attack but presented no evidence to support his claim. The Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, said Italy would not be shaken from its commitment to Iraq and the United States.

An Italian official representing the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American-led governing body, told reporters 12 hours after the blast that its force left little that was immediately identifiable from any vehicle or attacker. Whether the attack was carried out by a car and a truck, or only one vehicle, was in doubt, the official, Andrea Angeli, said.

He said the Italians killed were 11 military police officers, 4 soldiers and 2 civilians, one a television documentary filmmaker.

Attacks have killed more than 40 American soldiers since the beginning of November, and a total of 154 Americans since President Bush declared major combat operations over on May 1, contributing to a sense of crisis in Washington as administration officials seek ways to stabilize the situation.

The immediate question raised by Wednesday's bombing was how it would affect the United States' faltering efforts to draw other nations into committing troops and police to the occupation forces.

American officials say 33 nations are represented in the occupation effort, but an American diplomatic drive to draw contingents from Muslim nations like Turkey and Pakistan has failed, and several nations in Europe, including France and Germany, have also refused. Italy's role has been prized by Washington in the face of broad European resistance.

Among international agencies seeking to bring relief to Iraq's 22 million people, morale has been battered by the bombings of the United Nations headquarters in August, which killed 22 people, and the blast that struck the Baghdad compound of the International Red Cross late last month, killing at least 12. Both organizations have ordered all non-Iraqi personnel to leave Baghdad.

The attack on Wednesday was followed by reassurances for Washington from nations that have said that they will send troops here. In Portugal, which had pledged to replace some of the Italian paramilitary troops who were the target of the bombing, officials said plans to send 128 police officers to Iraq were unaltered. But opposition parties demanded that Prime Minister Jose Manuel Durao Barroso's conservative government review the plan, which has drawn limited support in Portuguese opinion polls.

Poland, which has 2,500 soldiers in Iraq, mostly in the British-led southern sector of the country, said that its troops would stay. The Polish units suffered the country's first combat death since World War II when a Polish soldier died in an Iraqi ambush last week.

For the occupation forces, the bombing was a disturbing change in the pattern of suicide attacks, which have been mainly concentrated in Baghdad and other cities in the central part of Iraq, close to the centers of Sunni Muslim population that were the core of support for Mr. Hussein's government.

But the most lethal of all the bomb attacks, outside a Muslim shrine in the city of Najaf in August, which killed more than 80 people, including one of the country's leading Shiite Muslim clerics, occurred in a city with a majority Shiite population.

Until Wednesday, Nasiriya had been something of a model for the occupation forces. Although paramilitary forces loyal to Mr. Hussein put up a fierce resistance at Nasiriya to American troops pushing north to Baghdad during the war to overthrow Mr. Hussein, the city has been mostly quiet for months. It was garrisoned first by marines, and then by Italians and Romanians. Iraqis interviewed across the city after Wednesday's blast that the occupation forces had been broadly popular, riding a wave of gratitude for ridding the country of Mr. Hussein.

It was a marked contrast to the Sunni cities of central Iraq like Falluja, Ramadi and Tikrit, where attacks on the Americans have drawn cheering crowds. That was the pattern last week, when two American helicopters were shot down, killing 22 American soldiers. In those areas, Mr. Hussein remains a hero.

In Nasiriya, the common attitude was grief for the Italians and support for the occupation forces. Reporters were assured that the attackers had to have come from the north, or perhaps from Islamic fundamentalist groups elsewhere in southern Iraq. On street corners, and in homes as much as a mile from the blast where doors were blown out and wrought-iron window grills buckled, people competed with one another to say that they did not want the attacks to drive coalition forces from Iraq. They were also proud of the role played by doctors at the Nasiriya hospital, where most of the wounded were taken, in treating Pfc. Jessica Lynch, who was taken prisoner after her maintenance unit was ambushed outside Nasiriya during the war and rescued in a helicopter raid. On Wednesday, many people asked after her.

Italian officers and officials lingered deep into the night outside the bombed buildings' shattered hulks. They said that the attack was a terrible blow for Italy, which had taken great pride in the role its military police had played in Bosnia and Kosovo, and in Albania. "Our policy has been to be quite open, and to have a genuine dialogue with the people," said Mr. Angeli, the spokesman for the occupation authority. "This is a real tragedy."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company