Iraq Violence Continues as War's First Anniversary Nears

March 18, 2004
By JOHN F. BURNS

AGHDAD, Iraq, March 18 — A bomb exploded today outside a hotel in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, and guerrillas and American forces exchanged fire west of Baghdad, continuing the violence that has marked the first anniversary this week of the Iraqi war.

In a separate incident, three employees of an American-funded television station were shot dead at Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, Reuters reported.

A spokeswoman at the coalition press information center in Baghdad, Sgt. Carmen Hickman, said the center was still waiting for details on all three incidents.

The violence came as the death toll in a bombing of the five-story Mount Lebanon Hotel in central Baghdad on Wednesday was being sharply revised downward; the American military, citing the Iraqi police and ministry of health, said there were 7 dead and 35 wounded. Initial reports by the American military on Wednesday put the death toll at 27, with 41 wounded.

Asked today how the Baghdad death toll could be so significantly altered, Gen. Mark T. Kimmitt, deputy commander of operations for the American command, said early reports of incidents "had a tendency to be incorrect." He added, "The longer you wait after an incident, the more precise you can get on your numbers."

One or two people were either killed or wounded in Basra today by either a roadside bomb or a car bomb, General Kimmitt said at a news briefing here, although he added that reports were sketchy.

News agencies quoted the Iraqi police and witnesses as saying that at least four people died at the Mirbad Hotel in Basra. Two other people, including a child, were wounded, Reuters reported a British military spokesman as saying.

British coalition forces, which control the city, and the Iraqi police cordoned off the area, preventing journalists from approaching the site. General Kimmitt said a large demonstration was being held in Basra but that the people's anger was not directed at any particular group, including coalition forces.

In Falluja, at the heart of the so-called Sunni Triangle 32 miles west of Baghdad, guerrillas with rocket-propelled grenades exchanged fire with American troops at the municipal council building , wounding eight United States troops, the Army said. Reuters reported that at least two Iraqis were killed.

General Kimmitt said the battle broke out as American soldiers were meeting local administrators in municipal offices. American troops were stationed on the roof of buildings around the area, the general said, and attackers fired several mortar rounds. One of them struck the roof of one of the buildings, wounding seven soldiers and a marine.

Their wounds were not life-threatening, General Kimmitt said.

The blast occurred as the anniversary of the first American bombing raid on Baghdad approaches this week; that raid took place at dawn on March 20 here last year, signaling the start of the war to topple Saddam Hussein.

American officers who had cautioned that pro-Hussein insurgents and militant Islamic terrorists might try to mark the anniversary of the start of the war with a new round of attacks were quick to point a finger at a Jordanian-born terrorist leader, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi.

The explosion in Baghdad reduced an apartment block across the road to a tangle of steel, masonry and shattered furniture, and it left an inferno of blazing cars and buildings that lighted the night sky for hours.

Iraqi rescue teams clawed at the rubble with hands and shovels deep into the night, but no survivors were pulled clear after the first frenzied hours. At least some victims appeared to be foreigners, mainly from Arab countries, including Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, the police said.

Survivors of Wednesday's bombing said Americans and Britons and other Europeans were among those staying at the hotel, which has traditionally attracted visiting Arab business people and, among Westerners, people on modest budgets working for relief agencies. But in the pandemonium at the scene and at neighboring hospitals in the hours after the blast, no clear picture emerged about the nationalities of the non-Iraqis who were killed or injured.

Colonel Baker, commander of the Second Brigade, First Armored Division, who led American troops who raced to the scene in armored Humvees, said the blast in Baghdad appeared to have been caused by a car bomb with at least 1,000 pounds of plastic explosives that had been combined with a core of wired-together artillery shells. He said attackers here had used the formula frequently to cause a maximum blast and a widespread curtain of deadly shrapnel.

At least two American soldiers were killed and six wounded in Balad, near Baghdad, in a mortar attack on the logistics base there on Wednesday, The Associated Press reported today. The military did not identify the soldiers involved.

Doctors at four Baghdad hospitals visited by reporters said the death toll could rise because of burn and crush injuries among survivors, some of whom lay groaning in poorly equipped emergency rooms while doctors attended more urgent cases.

Hospital entranceways and wards were a bedlam of wailing relatives, agitated Iraqi policemen with automatic rifles pushing back crowds, and gurneys and stretchers being rushed past, carrying bodies under bloodied blankets and black shrouds.

Last year the Baghdad headquarters of the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross were bombed, killing a total of almost 40 people. The worst single attack in the capital, two weeks ago, killed more than 80 people when three suicide bombers detonated themselves at a religious festival in Baghdad, simultaneously with similar attacks in nearby Karbala, which killed another 120 people.

Colonel Baker told reporters that the blast was "similar to that carried out in the past by Ansar al-Islam and the Zarqawi network." No specific evidence was offered implicating Mr. Zarqawi.

American intelligence has linked Mr. Zarqawi to Ansar al-Islam, a group linked to Al Qaeda. Last month American intelligence agencies named him as the author of an intercepted message urging Qaeda leaders to support efforts by Islamic militants to provoke a civil war among Shiite and Sunni Muslims here, in hope of blocking plans for a Western-style democracy.

A $10 million American bounty has been placed on Mr. Zarqawi's head as the prime suspect in devastating bombings across Iraq in the past few months, including the United Nations and Red Cross attacks. American commanders, dismissing reports that Mr. Zarqawi has fled to Iran, said recently that they believed he was still in Iraq and active in planning new attacks.

Many of the wounded here Wednesday had long waits for attention in the ill-lighted hospitals, which have begun with American financing to recover from years of neglect and from the looting and sabotage that followed the American capture of Baghdad. But the hospitals still lack much in the way of basic equipment and medicines. Iraqi doctors said many of the most critically injured had suffered head injuries, and would be operated on overnight.

At the bombing scene, in Karada, a busy commercial district, a gaping crater marked the spot where the bomb had detonated. Iraqi police officers said the bomb might have been carried in an orange-painted car, left a tangled wreck, that was thrown 150 feet clear.

American officials said later that the crater's position, in the center of the narrow street, combined with what they described as the hotel's lack of strategic significance, was read by American investigators as a sign that the bomb might have been detonated accidentally while en route to another target.

For the Americans, the Baghdad bombing marked an inauspicious start to a new military offensive in the capital. Hours before the blast, General Kimmitt said at a news briefing that in the new phase of the counteroffensive, the strikes, based on new intelligence, would give "a clear warning to the enemies of the Iraqi people," meaning the terrorists, that theirs was ultimately a doomed cause.

With no statement claiming responsibility for the blast, the motives were unknown. But the timing, close to the anniversary of the American invasion, and on the night marked for the new offensive, suggested that the attack might have been intended to taunt the Americans.

As well, by striking at another Iraqi target, the attackers might have been seeking to deepen the sense among Iraqis that they have substituted years of repression and fear under Mr. Hussein for a new era of fear, this time of terrorists, and that the American occupiers, who came as self-proclaimed liberators, are now at the root of Iraq's woes.

In any case, the grim tableau at the bomb scene stood as a ghastly anniversary marker. The blast, throwing first a blue flash and then a spreading cloud of smoke and fire above the rooftops, took place about three-quarters of a mile from the Palestine and Sheraton hotels, which are heavily guarded by bomb-proofed blast walls and American tanks and are the headquarters for many Western news organizations.

Arriving at the scene within minutes, reporters who evaded a cordon of volatile Iraqi policemen waving guns at the gathering crowd saw black-silhouetted rescue workers combing through the burning wreckage. From ambulances arriving helter-skelter, loudspeakers boomed out a mournful appeal for people to concentrate on survivors, not the limp and broken bodies of the dead.

The mood among Iraqis varied widely, reflecting the deeper splits here between those who credit the Americans as liberators and others who regard them as a new evil. Qahcan Shukur, owner of a furniture factory, was across the road when the explosion detonated, and was hit by shards of flying glass. He turned his wrath on the Americans.

"Why don't Americans maintain security?" he said. "All of this technology they have, and they cannot prevent these attacks? I don't believe it."

A block away, another group took a different view. After watching a weeping man rushing toward an ambulance, cradling the limp body of his small daughter, Zaki Mohammad, 41, an electrical engineer, halted a reporter and asked that a message be passed to L. Paul Bremer III, chief of the American occupation authority. "Tell Bremer to hang the people responsible for this in a park in the center of Baghdad," he cried. "The American policy here is tolerance, tolerance, tolerance, soft, soft, soft. This is not the way. The way is execution."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company