The Gulf Daily-News (Bahrain) – 2005-05-14 23:39:08
http://www.gulf-daily-news.com/story.asp?Article=112006&Sn=WORL&IssueID=28055
BAGHDAD (May 14, 2005) — The US last night conceded that the insurgency could last for many more years as 21 more people died in the relentless bloodshed in Iraq.
“This is a thinking and adapting adversary … I wouldn’t look for results tomorrow. One thing we know about insurgencies, that they last from three, four years to nine years,” General Richard Myers, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the Pentagon.
“This requires patience.”
His comments came after a car bomb exploded in a jammed commercial district in Baghdad, devastating the area and turning the sky grey as shops and restaurants caught fire in the most deadly of a string of attacks, which included the assassinations of an army general and a police colonel on their way to work.
Iraqis expressed growing fury at the continuing violence, which injured more than 90 people, throwing stones at police and US forces who came to the scene of the bombing.
The violence came despite a major US offensive in western Iraq, where fierce clashes were reported with insurgents on the outskirts of the Syrian border town of Qaim.
Emergency in Iraq Is Extended
The Gulf Daily-News (Bahrain)
BAGHDAD (May 14, 2005) — Iraq extended its six-month-old state of emergency yesterday against a backdrop of more violent insurgent attacks that have claimed the lives of more than 400 people since the start of the month.
American warplanes pounded a village and a cave in west of Saadah, about 320km northwest of Baghdad as more than 1,000 US forces hunted down followers of Iraq’s most wanted terrorist Abu Musab Al Zarqawi near the Syrian border.
The Marines claim they have killed more than 100 rebels over the past five days. Zarqawi’s network denied the losses and claimed his own men had killed 40 US troops.
Aid workers reported that hundreds of families had fled the fierce fighting near the border.
The hospital in Obeidi said 16 bodies have been brought to its morgue and some 30 people treated so far. Most casualties came from Karabilah and nearby Rommana, said a doctor.
In the latest violence, a suicide bomber drove his explosives-laden car at a truck transporting Iraqi soldiers in Baquba, north of the capital, killing two soldiers and a civilian.
Four more soldiers were wounded in a second car bomb attack on a convoy in the nearby village of Saif Saad.
A policeman was shot dead and five people wounded when gunmen opened fire on a police patrol in western Baghdad.
In northern Iraq, two soldiers and three rebels were killed in clashes near Shurgat, south of the region’s main city of Mosul. Near the key refinery town of Baiji further south, one bomb killed a civilian while another killed one US soldier and wounded four.
The death brought US losses since Saturday to 21 – one of the deadliest periods for US troops since the invasion.
A prominent Shiite religious politician meanwhile called for a new purge of the civil service to eliminate former high-ranking members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath party.
Iraqi security forces captured five men, including four Palestinians, who allegedly carried out a deadly Baghdad market bombing that killed at least 17 people, a police commander said yesterday.
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