Cox News Service April 10, 2004
Insurgents threaten to kill American as Iraqi fighting continues
By Charles Crain
Insurgents vowed Saturday night to kill an American contractor taken hostage in Iraq unless the United States military ends its campaign in the city of Fallujah.
"If you don't respond within 12 hours," one of his captors said in a videotape sent to the Arabic news network al Jazeera, "he will be treated worse than those who were killed and burned in Fallujah."
American Marines have pressed an assault in Fallujah since Monday in response to a March 31 attack in which four American security contractors were ambushed and killed by insurgents, then burned and mutilated by a mob of young men.
The hostage was abducted after an attack on an American supply convoy Friday. In the al Jazeera tape, the man, speaking in front of an Iraqi flag and with his right arm in a sling, identifies himself as Thomas Hamill, 43 years old.
He said he was working for a company contracted by the American-led coalition.
Hamill is a resident of Macon, Miss. A man who answered the phone at his house said Hamill works for KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton. The man would not give his name, but said he was a relative of Hamill's.
A phone message left with the Houston-based engineering and construction company's after-hours answering service was not immediately returned.
As the American military continued battles with a Shi'ite militia and Sunni insurgents across Iraq, some guerillas have begun targeting foreigners for kidnapping in attempts to coerce coalition governments. Several contractors and two soldiers went missing on Friday.
Al Jazeera reported that three Japanese hostages, whom their abductors had threatened to burn alive unless Japan withdrew its troops from Iraq by Sunday, would be released as a result of the intervention of an Iraqi Sunni religious organization.
Kidnappers are also holding a Palestinian and a Canadian aid worker from Jerusalem.
The kidnappings, and the detention and release of several western journalists in recent days, has heightened the sense of chaos that has engulfed much of Iraq since the start of the Marine campaign in Fallujah and the simultaneous uprising of a Shi'ite militia.
The American military and Iraqi security forces came under attack in Fallujah, Baghdad and the highway between Saturday as battles with Sunni insurgents and Shi'ite cleric Moqtadr Sadr's Mahdi Army entered their seventh day. Fifty-nine American servicemen have been killed and 281 wounded in the month of April according to the website globalsecurity.org.
Reuters reported young men with rifles and grenade launchers fought Iraqi police and American troops in Azamiyah, a Sunni district of Baghdad sympathetic to the long-running Sunni guerilla campaign against the American occupation.
Mustafir Faisil, 22, said he saw insurgents block off a street around 8 in the morning and then overrun the police station when officers fired on them. He said the police gave up without a fight, but that the insurgents withdrew after American troops arrived.
Faisil said several members of the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to the anti-American Shi'ite cleric Moqtadr Sadr, joined with Sunni fighters in the attack.
"We hugged them and saluted them," said Faisil. In recent days at least some insurgents seem to have put aside their religious rivalries to cooperate against the Americans. "Now our slogan is, 'there is no difference between Sunni and Shia.'"
He accused the United States of seeking to drive a wedge between Sunnis and Shia to consolidate their control over Iraq.
Later in the day the streets of Azamiyah were virtually deserted, with at least one American tank parked in the road and several American soldiers on the sidewalk. Civilians set up makeshift barriers of tree branches and tires and warned traffic away from the area.
Traffic was lighter and crowds scarcer than usual across Baghdad as some Sunnis observed a call from religious leaders for a general strike in protest against American military action in Fallujah.
In that Sunni city thirty-five miles west of Baghdad some fighting continued Saturday between U.S. Marines and insurgents despite the announcement Friday by CPA chief L. Paul Bremer III of a unilateral cease-fire. Estimates have varied widely, but some reports say hundreds of Iraqis have been killed in Fallujah since Monday.
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said the Marines had ceased offensive operations to allow talks between members of the Iraqi Governing Council and Fallujah city leaders. Kimmitt said the Marines had defended themselves against sporadic attacks because insurgent commanders were in some cases either unwilling or unable to rein in their fighters. Later Saturday CNN reported the insurgents had agreed to a 12-hour ceasefire.
The Associated Press reported that the council members were asking for the handover of foreign insurgents and the men responsible for the killing and mutilation of the contractors.
The military vowed before the offensive got underway to occupy the center of town and pacify the city, which has long been a focal point of attacks against American troops.
But as Marines blocked access to the city and engaged in bloody street fights with masked guerillas, dismay and outrage has grown among Iraqis concerned about civilian deaths. One member of the Governing Council has suspended his membership in response to the American campaign, and another has said he will leave the council if attempts to broker a peaceful solution fail.
Kimmitt, though, said Saturday that the heavy casualties among non-combatants have resulted from the insurgents' tactic of hiding amongst civilians to launch attacks, and denied that the whole city was being targeted.
"This is not collective punishment," Kimmitt said. "This is not a punitive operation."
Fighting also continued in southern and northeastern Iraq between American troops and Sadr's militia. A soldier was killed in a mortar attack in Balad, and the AP reported that forty Iraqis were killed and several Americans wounded in Baqouba when insurgents launched failed attempts to seize government buildings and a police station.
In Kut, Americans had retaken most of the city from Sadr's militia. According to CNN, troops who had been awaiting flights home in Kuwait were instead sent back to Iraq to aid in the American counterattack.
Charles Crain is a freelance journalist on assignment for Cox Newspapers. Atlanta Journal-Constitution staff writer Don Plummer contributed to this report.
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