IRAQ: The head of Iraq's governing council said yesterday that the US-led occupation forces would have to do more to provide security in the aftermath of bomb attacks which killed at least 181 people at Shia Islam's holiest shrines this week.
The comments by Mr Mohammed Bahr al-Uloum, a Shia cleric and current president of the US-appointed council, underlined friction between leaders of the Shia majority and the occupying forces over the wave of devastating attacks on Iraqis.
Not long after he spoke, at least three people were killed in a rocket attack on a car near a telephone exchange in west Baghdad, police said. That incident followed a bomb blast at another Baghdad exchange on Wednesday, raising fears that Iraq's communications network is now being targeted.
Iraq's leading Shia cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, whose call for elections forced Washington to speed up its timetable for arranging a poll, has blamed US forces for failing to secure Iraq's borders. Another council member said the attacks showed that Iraqi militias should be in charge of security. "I put the blame on the authorities," Mr Bahr al-Uloum told reporters when he visited a hospital where survivors of Tuesday's attack on Baghdad's Kadhimiya shrine were being treated.
Iraq's US governor, Mr Paul Bremer, said on Wednesday that Washington would spend $60 million to boost security along Iraq's borders. He said that hundreds more military vehicles and Iraqi security personnel would be used to tighten up security.
Brig-Gen Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for the US army in Iraq, said that the death toll from Tuesday's attacks was 71 in Baghdad and at least 110 in Kerbala.
Gen Kimmitt said that 553 people had been wounded in the attacks, which involved three suicide-bombers in Baghdad and a suicide-bomber, hidden explosives and mortar attacks in Kerbala. Iran's state news agency reported that 49 Iranians were among those killed in the Kerbala blasts.
Iraqi and US officials said that the bombings, which targeted worshippers as they commemorated the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, a revered figure in Shia Islam, were part of a campaign linked to al-Qaeda to foment civil war in Iraq.
Gen John Abizaid, the commander of US forces in the region, said he had information linking Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to the attacks and suggesting that al-Zarqawi had links with the spy network of the former Iraqi regime. US forces have put a $10 million price on al-Zarqawi's head.
The US military last month released a letter it attributed to al-Zarqawi which outlined a strategy of attacks to pit Shia and Sunni Muslims against each other to undermine the Iraqi security forces which Washington wants to strengthen before handing sovereignty to an Iraqi government on June 30th.
A US general said that while foreign militants crossing the borders posed the biggest threat in terms of the effectiveness and sophistication of their attacks, most of those now fighting the occupation troops were Iraqis.
Brig-General Martin Dempsey, commander of the 1st Armoured Division in charge of Baghdad, told reporters that the command structure of the insurgency was changing, with religious militants taking over from supporters of Saddam Hussein.
"There's little doubt that the same trigger-pullers who used to pull triggers for the former regime are probably pulling triggers for someone else," he said.
Tuesday's attacks marked the bloodiest day in Iraq since Saddam Hussein was toppled and focused the wrath of Shias, who make up 60 per cent of the population, on Washington, which they accuse of doing too little to make the country safe.
- (Reuters)