Iraqi Police Deny Zarqawi Men Used House Hit in Raid

Fadel Badran

Iraqi security officers said yesterday they found no trace of the militants US commanders say were targeted in an airstrike on the hotspot town of Fallujah, only ordinary civilians, 26 of whom were killed.

But Iraq’s interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi defended the airstrike and said the US military had informed his government before the raid on what it said was a safe house used by militants led by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian described by the Americans as Al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq.

“We know that a house which had been used by terrorists had been hit. We welcome this hit on terrorists anywhere in Iraq,” Allawi told a news conference yesterday.

However, Fallujah’s police chief and a senior officer in the Fallujah Brigade in charge of security in the fiercely anti-US town denied that foreign fighters had operated from the house.

“We inspected the damage, we looked through the bodies of the women and children and elderly. This was a family,” Brig. Nouri Aboud of the Fallujah Brigade said. “There is no sign of foreigners having lived in the house. Zarqawi and his men have no presence in Fallujah.”

The raid targeted a poor neighborhood in southern Fallujah and hit the house of a man named Jassem Mohammed Fayyad, killing several members of his family and his neighbors, said Capt. Mohammed Abdul Karim.

“Among the dead were three children, between eight and 12 years old,” he said, adding that the total death toll was 26, including eight people who had been buried almost immediately and 18 whose bodies had been brought to hospital.

The US military allowed the Fallujah Brigade, led by former Iraqi army officers, to take over security in the town under a truce last month that ended battles between US Marines and insurgents in which hundreds of people were killed.

The raid shattered a lull in Fallujah and fuelled tensions before the formal end of Iraq’s US-led occupation on June 30. Since the truce, Fallujah has been quieter, although the US military said a Marine was killed in action on Saturday in western Iraq — the 615th US combat death since the invasion.

In Baghdad, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt insisted the destroyed house in Fallujah was being used by fighters loyal to Zarqawi, accused by Washington of leading a bloody campaign of suicide bombings and of decapitating a US hostage last month.

US military officers said there was no sign Zarqawi himself — who has a $10 million price on his head — was in the house in Fallujah when it was destroyed.

The Iraqi government says foreign militants are involved in sabotage that last week brought vital oil exports to a halt.

Exports remained halted yesterday as technicians continued working on a sabotaged pipeline feeding southern terminals, a Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman said.

“Repairs were continuing as of 16:10 p.m. (local time/1210 GMT). There are no crude oil exports at the moment, according to our South Oil Company contacts,” said Dominic D’Angelo, dismissing earlier reports that the pipeline was repaired.

Insurgents have sown havoc ahead of the June 30 handover to a new interim Iraqi government.

The home of Interior Minister Faleh Al-Naqib came under rocket fire in the town of Samarra, northwest of Baghdad, on Saturday night, police said. Naqib was not there at the time, but four of his bodyguards were killed.

Three Iraqis were killed and 11 people wounded, including two US soldiers, in clashes overnight after militiamen ambushed a US convoy in Baghdad’s Sadr City, the military and hospital officials said yesterday.

Around 11:00 p.m. (1900 GMT), militiamen hit a US military patrol with rocket-propelled grenades, small-arms fire and a bomb, wounding two soldiers, a military spokesperson said.

Sadr City’s hospitals reported three Iraqis killed and said at least seven non-combatants were wounded in the fighting.

A small roadside bomb blew up on the eastern side of the Tigris river by Baghdad’s Al-Shuhada bridge early yesterday, killing one civilian and wounding three others.

In Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit, further north, unidentified gunmen killed a local council member, Izzeddin Ibrahim Abdullah, and a bodyguard on Saturday night, police said.

A bomb blast near the Central Bank in the middle of Baghdad killed a guard and wounded several bank employees yesterday morning, a bank official said.

Meanwhile, firebrand Shiite leader Moqtada Sadr has been invited to the July political conference to select a national council that will advise Iraq’s interim government, an Iraqi official said yesterday.

“An invitation has been sent to Moqtada Sadr,” said Fuad Maasum, the chair of the committee preparing the conference.

He added that a thousand people would be invited to the conference, which aims to have representatives of political movements, tribes and regions from across Iraq to select the country’s 100-member interim national council.

http://www.arabnews.com/?page=4§ion=0&article=47119&d=21&m=6&y=2004