Iraqis' disillusion with US occupation fuels resistance

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Sunday, November 16, 2003

Iraqis' disillusion with US occupation fuels resistance

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Iraqi fighters' resistance to US occupation of their country has assumed a more serious trend in the past month, inflicting mounting losses of US-led coalition forces. In the past two weeks alone, US forces suffered more than 40 fatalities while the Italian mission lost 18 men in a car bomb in Nasiriya city, 370 km south of Baghdad.

Nine Iraqis were also killed in the Nasiriya attack and more than 100 others injured when the car, packed with explosives and driven by a suicide bomber, rammed the outside wall of the Italian military police headquarters.

Italy, whose 2,400-strong troops are stationed in Nasiriya, has suffered the highest number of fatal casualties by the coalition forces in one day.

The United States led a war in March against oil-rich Iraq and terminated the 24-year rule of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, thus creating a big power vacuum which the coalition forces have failed so far to fill.

Before the war, US President George W. Bush pledged himself toturn war-ravaged Iraq into a "model democracy and prosperous country" in the troubled area of the Middle East.

However, seven months have passed since the end of the war, almost nothing of this promise has come true. On the contrary, the security situation in Iraq is worsening daily.

This has been greatly disappointing the 25-million Iraqi people whose main aspiration is peace and security.

Almost everybody is wondering whether anything has changed in the post-Saddam Iraq.

No day passes now without 10 to 20 Iraqis are killed, either at the hands of organized crime gangs, excessive fire by jumpy American soldiers, or by car bombings and armed attacks by unknown armed men.

Meanwhile, armed attacks on US-led coalition forces are becoming more incessant and better coordinated. Two US helicopters were downed by surface-to-air projectiles within one week, inflicting 22fatalities among the US soldiers.

In a deliberate show of force, the US military command in Iraq last week ordered F-16 fighter bombers to attack the surroundings of Saddam's hometown of Tikrit, 170 km north of Baghdad.

In Washington, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in one of its highly classified reports, has warned the White House that resistance to US and allied forces in Iraq could strengthen beyond control in coming months as more and more Iraqis grow disillusioned with US occupation and decide to act against it.

According to US officials, the warning is contained in a report compiled by a CIA mission in Iraq and approved by US civil administrator of Iraq Paul Bremer.

The report estimates that 50,000 Iraqis are either actively participating in resistance or supporting it.

Facing such worsening situation, the White House unexpectedly recalled Bremer to Washington last Monday for urgent consultations on how to best pacify the violence-torn Iraq.

Most of Bush's top advisers reportedly believe that speeding up the transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis could provide a way out of this messy situation in war-ravaged Iraq.

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