GIs & Iraqi Cops Targeted
Guerrillas injured six people in an attack Thursday on a police station in central Iraq, and a U.S. military vehicle was destroyed in an ambush at an intersection in Baghdad. The American troops in the vehicle escaped injury.
The Ramadi Police Directorate 100 miles west of Baghdad was struck by two rockets as officers gathered inside to receive their monthly salaries, said Maj. Samir Habib. Two policemen and four civilians were wounded, he said.
Ramadi, a town on the main highway between Iraq and Jordan, is part of the so-called Sunni Triangle — a region north and west of Baghdad that has seen fierce resistance to the U.S.-led occupation.
In south-central Baghdad, insurgents detonated a roadside bomb near an American military vehicle, witnesses said. Smoke billowed from the vehicle while helicopters clattered overhead and U.S. soldiers cordoned off the area.
"Everybody got out in time," said Sgt. James Thompson, a soldier at the scene.
In other developments:
Meanwhile, U.S. forces on Thursday kept up their daily raids against suspected rebel strongholds, including an overnight raid in Saddam's hometown of Tikrit that netted some illegal weapons.
Many analysts warn that the U.S. military risks alienating significant segments of the Iraqi population through heavy-handed military responses to deadly hit-and-run attacks by insurgents. The United States maintains that most Iraqis support its efforts to restore stability.
On Wednesday, U.S. and Iraqi officials revealed they were considering creating a specialized Iraqi paramilitary battalion to help fight the insurgents. The new plan to create a specialized Iraqi tactical unit capable of conducting independent operations appears to be aimed at bolstering counterinsurgency efforts and replacing U.S. combat troops in the anti-guerrilla role with Iraqi forces.
American officials in Baghdad and Washington said the new 1,000-member unit would be formed by uniting fighters from five Iraqi political parties under the joint leadership of the U.S. military and the emerging Iraqi Civil Defense Corps.
If created, the paramilitary unit would represent a significant policy reversal by the United States, which previously declared private militias illegal and called on Iraqi political leaders to disband them.
The Pentagon's policy chief said Wednesday the United States would welcome militia members into the Iraqi security forces as long as they agreed to drop their previous party affiliations.
"We are willing to take people into these forces as long as when they come in they are not operating as members of these other (militia) forces," Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith said in Washington.
The current president of the Iraqi Governing Council, Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, a Shiite Muslim, said the country's five or so individual militias have won credibility for fighting Saddam's regime for more than 20 years, and could root out that regime's remnants now.
"At this stage, we should try to make use of any force, any tribal clan and any individual that can help," he said, adding that the militias should be centrally controlled, as the Americans have stipulated.