Rockets Hit Two Hotels and Ministry in Baghdad

November 21, 2003
by John F Burns

BAGHDAD — The Palestine and Sheraton hotels in central Baghdad were hit by a volley of rockets shortly at about 7:15 on Friday morning. First indications were that there were no casualties among the large number of Americans and other Westerners who live in the Palestine Hotel, but a CNN report said at least two wounded people had been carried from the Sheraton after the attack.

Just before the attack on the hotels, two rockets were fired at the Oil Ministry, nearby. There were no reports of casualties in that attack.

The two 20-story hotels, on the east bank of the Tigris River, have long been regarded as potential targets for terrorist attacks.

The rockets hit simultaneously from opposite sides of the two hotels, suggesting a degree of sophistication in the planning of the attack. The rockets that hit the Palestine Hotel, where this reporter was staying, struck on the 15th and 16th floors, where rooms are mostly occupied by reporters and Westerners working for companies involved in reconstruction efforts across Iraq.

At both hotels, there are a large number of American officials protected by uniformed American troops of the First Armored Division. American soldiers were quickly at the scene, clearing rooms and ushering guests down fire stairwells.

After Friday's strikes on the two floors of the Palestine Hotel hit by the rockets, guests milled about the corridors in their nightclothes, stepping over rubble and into air thick with soot and grime, as a loudspeaker urged then to go down stairwells to the ground. Guests in the room close to where the rockets struck — including this reporter, whose room was 50 feet away from one of the strikes — heard what appeared at first to be a single explosion, suggesting that the weapon used on Oct. 26 against the hotel might have been a multiple rocket launcher of the type used against the Rashid Hotel, base for many senior American military and intelligence officials. One person was killed.

The attack was potentially the most serious strike on a major target involving foreigners in Baghdad since the Oct. 26 suicide bombing of the International Committee of the Red Cross, one of a series of suicide bombings that day across the city that killed more than 25 people.

The pattern of several of the most serious attacks in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq in recent months has appeared to have been aimed at driving as many Westerners out of the country as possible, isolating the American and British troops who carried the brunt of fighting in the war to topple Saddam Hussein, and making impossible the implementation of plans to spend billions of dollars on reconstruction here.

A voice purporting to be that of Mr. Hussein said in an audiotape released Sunday that those mounting the attacks on the Americans should also concentrate on "foreign agents" who were assisting in the occupation of Iraq, and that the defeat of "the evil ones" meaning the Americans was inevitable.

The strike on the Palestine Hotel was an eerie echo of an American tank shell that hit the hotel on April 7, two days before American forces overran Baghdad. The shell fired from a bridge across the Tigris to the north of the hotel, also struck on the 15th floor, killing two men, a Ukrainian and a Spaniard, both television cameramen. A Pentagon investigation later cleared the tank unit of responsibility, saying the shell had been fired by a tank commander who did not know that the hotel used by almost all the foreign reporters in Baghdad.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company