BAGHDAD, Iraq – Iraq’s interim prime minister publicly blamed U.S.-led forces Tuesday for “gross negligence” that led to the massacre of as many as 51 American-trained Iraqi soldiers as insurgents carried out new attacks against Iraqi police and national guardsmen and assassinated a local government official.
Meanwhile, insurgents made a new threat of nationwide attacks against U.S. and Iraqi forces “with weapons and military tactics they have not experienced before” if American forces try to storm the militant stronghold of Fallujah.
Video posted on a militant Islamic Web site in the name of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s group also showed what it claimed was a Japanese captive and threatened to behead him within 48 hours unless Japan pulls its troops from Iraq. Japan’s public broadcaster NHK identified the hostage as Akio Koda of the southern city of Fukuoka.
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi rejected the demand.
In remarks to the Iraqi National Council, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said of Saturday’s killings: “This was a horrible crime. … We think that this is due to negligence by the multinational forces.”
Allawi offered no explanation of how his allies had been negligent. He said the Iraqi government would investigate the incident and report back to him within three weeks.
A U.S. military spokesman focused the blame on the insurgents.
“This was a coldblooded and systematic massacre by terrorists. They, and no one else, must be held fully accountable for these heinous acts,” Lt. Col. Steven Boylan said in a statement. “We will provide full support and cooperation to establish the facts and avoid repetition of similar incidents.”
Iraqi security forces have suffered a rapidly rising death toll in recent months. Although the U.S. military has delivered substantially more equipment to them in that time, some Iraqi officials complain that police, national guard and army personnel lack sufficient training, equipment and protection from insurgent attacks.
Speaking to the National Council on Tuesday, Iraqi Interior Minister Falah Naqib said it would take more than six months to train police well enough to combat “terrorists.”
Since late June, when the interim government was appointed, there have been 92 suicide car bombings that killed 567 people in Iraq, Naqib said, according to news services.
In the weekend attack, the soldiers, who had just graduated from training at a large military base in eastern Iraq, were ambushed as they were traveling home on leave. Most of the soldiers were found lying face down in rows, shot in the back of the head. Others were found on a burned bus in the same area.
A similarly chilling incident appeared to be under way Tuesday, as an Arabic Web site run by a militant group calling itself the Ansar al Sunna Army announced that the group had captured 11 members of the Iraqi national guard between Baghdad and the south-central city of Hillah. The site showed photographs of the guardsmen.
Also Tuesday, militants calling themselves the “factions of the Islamic Resistance Movement in Iraq” warned in a videotape that if the Americans try to overrun Fallujah, “we swear in the name of God that all armed factions will attack all military and civilian targets of the occupation forces and the interim government.”
“We will attack them with weapons and military tactics they have not experienced before and in the ways and forms of our choosing,” the masked gunman added.
In Fallujah, a U.S. airstrike on an alleged safe house killed a high-ranking associate of Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the military said. The United States has been bombing sites in the rebel stronghold since midsummer in an effort to kill him and eliminate his group.
Other developments
* A Yakima-based Marine reserve unit is being mobilized and will be sent to Iraq. Mobilization orders were received Monday by Company B, 4th Tank Battalion of the 4th Marine Division. Most of the 120 reservists are from Washington state. The unit will be called up in January and serve about a year as military police, convoy security and at checkpoints. Their first stop will be Camp Lejeune, N.C., for training.
* The Army will not shorten combat tours in Iraq next year from 12 months to six or nine months, as some had hoped, because that would undermine the war effort, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, said Tuesday.
* Amnesty International today renewed its call for the United States to set up an independent investigation of the abuse of prisoners in Afghanistan; at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; and at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
* The latest identification reported by the U.S. military of personnel who recently died in Iraq:
Marine Lance Cpl. Richard Slocum, 19, Saugus, Calif.; died Sunday in a vehicle accident near Abu Ghraib; assigned to 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, 3rd Marine Division, III Marine Expeditionary Force, Marine Corps Base, Hawaii.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
