World

Bremer Was Target Of Iraq Attack

December 20, 2003 / 11:37 AM EST / CBS/AP

A spokesman for the U.S.-led authority in Iraq confirmed Friday that chief U.S. administrator Paul Bremer escaped an ambush on his convoy two weeks ago in Baghdad.

Meanwhile, a roadside bomb exploded near a U.S. military tanker truck outside the capital, wounding two U.S. soldiers, while an Iraqi woman died as another blast hit the office of a major Shiite party.

The attack on Bremer's convoy took place on December 6th, the same day Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld arrived in Baghdad, but has been kept quiet by the coalition authority until now, says CBS News Reporter Charles D'Agata.

Bremer's convoy was struck by a roadside bomb, then ambushed by insurgents with automatic weapons — typical of the attacks seen almost daily against U.S. troops. The convoy sped off and no one was injured in the attack, which took place on a stretch of highway in west Baghdad near the airport.

Bremer has not curtailed his schedule of touring Iraq since the incident said Dan Senor, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition that oversees Iraq.

In other developments:

The U.S. will spend $2 million over the next six months to provide work for Iraqi scientists suspected of participating in the country's weapons of mass destruction programs. State Department spokesperson Richard Boucher said the programs goals were, "first, to keep Iraqi scientists from providing their expertise to countries of concern or groups of concern; and second of all, to enable them to serve in the economic and technological rebuilding of Iraq."

Some 140 U.S. soldiers from the 3rd Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division raided a middle-class neighborhood near Baghdad's international airport overnight and arrested five of seven suspected guerrillas, the military said Friday.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan called Thursday for a Jan. 15 meeting of major players to discuss what role the international body might play when Iraq makes the transition from U.S. occupation. Annan complained that neither interim Iraqi leaders nor U.S. officials were giving him answers.

Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Fedotov said the fate of Russian companies and economic interests in Iraq will affect Moscow's position in talks on relieving Baghdad's massive international debt burden. President Vladimir Putin has said Russia is willing to start negotiations on relieving Iraq's $8 billion in debt to Moscow, its largest creditor.

A cardinal who rebuked the United States for treating Saddam Hussein "like a cow" after his capture was expressing his personal opinion and not the view of Pope John Paul II, the Vatican said.

The brief respite from political attacks over the war that Prime Minister Tony Blair enjoyed after Saddam's capture ended when the head of the rival Tory party called for a new probe into allegations that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

According to The New York Times, the Bush administration is bargaining with interim Iraqi leaders over what powers U.S. troops will have in their country after the Iraqi reclaim sovereignty this summer.
The predawn attack on the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution party came a day after Shiites buried a senior politician assassinated Wednesday as he left his home in Baghdad.

Rahim Jabar said his sister was killed and five other residents were wounded in the explosion, which brought down half of a one-story residential building that also housed a party branch office.

Party officials blamed both attacks on loyalists of Saddam Hussein, who was captured by U.S. forces on Saturday.

Supreme Council members were rushing to the scene, and an anti-Saddam rally was planned in the capital later Friday.

In the roadside bombing, the tanker truck blew up about 7:50 a.m. and television footage showed clouds of black smoke rising near Abu Ghraib, about 20 miles west of Baghdad.

Capt. Tammy Galloway of the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division said a homemade device exploded as a military truck was passing and two soldiers were wounded. Iraqi witnesses earlier said that two soldiers were killed in the blast.

Then another witness, 19-year-old Jassim Mohammed, said he saw the bodies of two Iraqis in a civilian car damaged in the blast.

On Thursday, the military reported that rebels had killed a U.S. soldier in the first fatal ambush for the U.S. military since Saddam's capture.

The soldier was killed late Wednesday when a 1st Armored Division patrol came under fire in northwest Baghdad, the military said. A second soldier and an Iraqi interpreter were wounded.

According to official reports, 314 U.S. soldiers have been killed in combat since the war began March 20, including 199 since President Bush declared the end of major combat on May 1. Another 144 soldiers have died in non-hostile incidents, according to the Pentagon.

Several attacks on U.S. forces and Iraqi police in recent days have claimed more than a dozen lives in Baghdad and in predominantly Sunni areas west and north of the capital, once Saddam's power base.

U.S. forces also have conducted major operations in Samarra, a focus of guerrilla resistance 60 miles north of Baghdad, since Saddam was captured.

Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, had spoken out at a news conference Tuesday called to introduce the pope's annual message for the Church's World Day of Peace on Jan. 1.

Martino said Saddam should face trial for his crimes but that the world should have been spared the images of his medical examination after his capture.

"I feel pity at seeing this destroyed man, treated like a cow having his teeth checked," Martino said, responding to a question on the Vatican's reaction to the capture.

The pope was a staunch opponent of the U.S.-led war in Iraq and the fact that it was launched without U.N. authorization.