Agence France Presse October 30, 2003
Red Cross trims foreign staff in Iraq after bombing as US losses hit benchmark
The international Red Cross said Wednesday it was cutting back its foreign staff in Iraq, two days after a truck bomb devastated its offices here, but that it was not abandoning the war-torn country.
The announcement came as US forces saw their combat deaths since US President George W. Bush declared major hostilities over on May 1 surpass those notched up in the war to oust dictator Saddam Hussein.
Pierre Kraehenbuehl, operations director for the International Committee of the Red Cross, insisted at a press conference in Geneva that "the ICRC is not withdrawing from Iraq.
"We are reducing the number of our international staff and implementing additional measures for the security of our remaining staff," he said at the ICRC headquarters.
"We have no choice but to adapt the way we work in Iraq."
The ICRC has 30 to 40 foreigners and about 700 Iraqi staff in the country, and had already pared down the number of expatriates since a Sri Lankan colleague was shot dead near Baghdad in July.
A US defense official in Washington meanwhile said a former Iraqi general, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, is believed to be coordinating attacks in Iraq by foreign fighters and Iraqi regime loyalists.
The reports fingering al-Douri as the coordinator of the attacks probably came from the recent capture in Mosul of a former secretary of al-Douri and two senior members of Ansar al-Islam, the official said.
In a spectacular assault on US forces, an M1A2 Abrams tank was disabled by a roadside explosion that left two crew members and a third wounded, a US military spokesmen in Washington said.
"Two soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division were killed and one was wounded when their tank hit an unidentified explosive device," the US military said in a statement.
Military spokesmen in Washington and Baghdad said it was the first time the army's main battle tank had been disabled by a roadside explosion since Iraqi opposition forces have begun targeting US convoys and patrols with so-called improvised explosive devices.
The force of the blast caused the behemoth to roll over an embankment, which is what killed and injured its occupants, an official said.
The latest model of the 69.5-tonne tank, the M1A2 SEP, is armed with a 120mm main cannon and is "the most heavily equipped, and heavily armored main battle tank that the US has ever put out in the field," said Patrick Garrett, an analyst with GlobalSecurity.Org, a private research group.
"If it is true that a tank was damaged to this sort of extent resulting in fatalities by a simple roadside bomb, depending on whatever size it was, that does not bode well for the future of the occupation," he said.
"That really does prove there is no safe place for American soldiers," he said.
Elsewhere in Iraq, two mortar rounds were fired on a hospital regularly visited by US forces in the northern oil centre of Kirkuk late Wednesday.
A hospital security official said the two rounds landed in an interior courtyard of the hospital without causing casualties or damage.
The ICRC pullout appeared to be deeply troubling to the United States, with Secretary of State Colin Powell appealing directly to the chief of the agency not to pull foreign staff out of Iraq after the bombing of its headquarters in Baghdad on Monday.
That was one of a series of almost simultaneous car bomb attacks around the Iraqi capital that killed 43 people, including two Iraqi ICRC staffers, and wounded more than 200.
But Kraehenbuehl was adamant that despite the "devastating blow", the staunchly neutral agency was making an independent decision on the best course of action.
"Any comment or advice is useful, but we'll definitely be making our own determinations as to the future," he said.
The attack was reminiscent of an August 19 suicide bombing on the UN headquarters in Baghdad that killed 22 people, prompting the United Nations to reduce its foreign staff in Iraq.
Kraehenbuehl said the details of a partial rundown were being worked out, and could depend on the degree of risk in different parts of the country.
Aid workers regard the region around the capital Baghdad as the most dangerous area to work in.
The Red Cross decision, taken as other aid agencies pondered the future of their operations in Iraq, came as US troop losses since May 1 reached 116, two more than were killed in the original invasion.
Six car bombings in 48 hours, a rocket attack on the coalition's fortified Baghdad compound, as well as the drive-by shooting of Baghdad's deputy mayor have significantly upped the stakes in the battle for Iraq's future this week.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair Wednesday blamed "evil people" who do not want to see "a strong and prosperous Iraq".
"We will continue to do everything we can to thwart them and reconstruct the country," Blair pledged.
Another key US ally, Spain, said the surge in violence was a direct response to the success of an international donors' conference in Madrid last week which secured some 33 billion dollars in aid pledges for Iraq's reconstruction.
The bloodshed was "the reaction, no more, no less, to the success" of the meeting, said Foreign Minister Ana Palacio.
Senior military and intelligence officers said they thought it was likely an elite cadre of between 200 and 400 foreign militants were importing suicide bombers from neighbouring Arab countries to carry out the attacks.
© Copyright 2003, Agence France Presse
