Tension prevails around Baghdad

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Saturday, November 01, 2003

Tension prevails around Baghdad

Tension prevailed around the Iraqi capital city on Friday as rumors spread that the ousted Arab Baath Socialist Party would stage new attacks in the coming days.

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Tension prevailed around the Iraqi capital city on Friday as rumors spread that the ousted Arab Baath Socialist Party would stage new attacks in the coming days.

US troops and Iraqi police backed by tanks and armored vehicles have set up checkpoints everywhere, searching cars for weapons and munitions.

Behind the barricades that enclose the United Nations headquarters in northern Baghdad, a security officer told Xinhua that most of the 30 foreign staff had left the country.

The decision to pull out the foreign workers to reorient the United Nations' future operations in Iraq was made after 12 people were killed in a suicide bombing at the office of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Baghdad.

The ICRC's foreign staff were also preparing to go abroad to reassess the situation in the wake of Monday's deadly bombing.

The US consular office in Baghdad issued a statement encouraging American citizens to "continue to maintain a high level of vigilance" against a widely rumored "day of resistance."

In a letter distributed among Iraqis, the ousted Baath Party Region Command told Iraqi citizens not to go to public places as it would wage fresh attacks on Nov. 1 or Nov. 2, six months after US President George W. Bush declared the end of the major war campaign, since when as many as 118 US soldiers have been killed.

On Friday, a soldier from the 82nd Airborne Division was killed and four others were wounded in a bomb attack near Khaldiya, 80 kmwest of Baghdad.

Another two were wounded in a clash with pro-Saddam demonstrators in Abu Ghuraib, a suburb in western Baghdad. The half-hour skirmish was said to have left four Iraqis dead, including a policeman.

Meanwhile, at least four explosions were heard in the capital city late Friday, and two of them with thick smoke seen rising and fading away over a former presidential palace now taken over by the US military.

These explosions followed another one at the municipal office in Fallujah, 50 km west of Baghdad, on Friday afternoon. Iraqi police said the building was attacked by armed men with rocket-propelled grenades.

In Auja, the birthplace of Saddam Hussein, US troops cordoned off roads with newly erected barbed wires following tips that people living in the northern village were involved in the anti-US attacks. Residents were asked to register for identity cards.

US officials have blamed a spate of intensified attacks and suicide bombings on the remnants of the former regime or foreign terrorists that infiltrated into the war-torn country.

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