U.S. Soldier Killed in Iraq; U.N. Nuke Team at Work
By Alistair Lyon
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - An American soldier was shot dead at a checkpoint near the Syrian border, the U.S. military said Monday, as U.N. experts carried out more checks on a looted storage site at Iraq (news - web sites)'s main nuclear facility.
The soldier was killed late Sunday when a vehicle drew up at a traffic checkpoint at Qaim, and the occupants asked for medical help, U.S. Central Command said in a statement.
Two people with pistols got out and shot the soldier. His comrades returned fire, killing one attacker and capturing a second. At least one other assailant fled in the vehicle.
The shooting was the latest in a spate of attacks on U.S. soldiers since Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) was toppled. Since Baghdad fell on April 9, 39 U.S. soldiers have been killed by enemies and 41 in accidents, bringing total deaths in the Iraq campaign to 182.
Another troubling development in the lawlessness unleashed by the fall of Saddam, has been looting at the sprawling nuclear compound at Tuwaitha, 12 miles south of Baghdad. Thieves emptied barrels that had stored low-enriched uranium and sold them locally. U.S. forces say they have bought back 100 barrels.
The U.N. team, from the International Atomic Energy Agency, has been in Iraq since Friday under tight U.S. restrictions on its mission. It wants to establish how much material, previously under IAEA seal, is still missing.
The United States wants no precedent to be set for IAEA or other U.N. inspectors to play a role in the so far fruitless search for Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction.
U.N. inspectors found little evidence of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons in four months of work before their hunt was cut short by the U.S. and British invasion on March 20.
The failure of the troops to find any such arsenal since then has prompted new questions about Washington and London's main justification for war, even as they struggle to rebuild the country from the ashes of Saddam's legacy.
FACE OF SADDAM
Saddam himself is missing, but his face lives on.
A cash crisis has forced Iraq's U.S.-led administration to print new banknotes with the former dictator's face on them.
Officials at the plundered and fire-ravaged central bank building said presses began printing millions of Saddam dinars last week to ease a crisis over discredited 10,000-dinar notes.
Nobody wants the high-denomination notes, worth about $10, introduced in the last years of Saddam's rule. People fear they can be faked and may ultimately be declared worthless, hence a decision to print large numbers of smaller denominations.
"It was not possible to change the banknotes for the time being," Faleh Salman, the acting central bank governor, told Reuters. "There is no national authority in Iraq at the moment to change the design of the banknotes."
Another rather different paper problem confronting Iraqis is the loss of property records, stolen or burned when thieves ransacked and burned the main land registry offices in central Baghdad after the capital fell on April 9.
"It appears that 20 percent of the records have gone," Zeidan Khalaf, head of the land registry, told Reuters.
The missing documentation could impede investment in the real estate market and hamper Iraq's efforts to recover from three wars in two decades and from 13 years of U.N. sanctions.
AWASH WITH GUNS
The occupying powers are also grappling with the feeble impact of a nine-day-old U.S. gun amnesty under which Iraqis have until June 14 to turn in heavy weapons.
Many Iraqis who did not own guns before the invasion have acquired them since, saying they need to protect their homes and businesses against armed criminals.
Central Command said Iraqis had turned in 343 pistols and rifles, along with 24 machineguns and 78 anti-tank weapons. It is a drop in the ocean in terms of the amount of lethal hardware in the hands of the nation's 26 million people.
Some Iraqis are turning those guns on U.S. troops.
Apart from the shooting near the Syrian border, the military said soldiers also came under fire Sunday from attackers in a mosque in the Sunni Muslim city of Falluja for the second time in as many days, but did not shoot back.
Hostility to the United States has run high in the western city since troops killed 15 townspeople in clashes there in April. More than 3,000 soldiers and dozens of tanks went to the area last week, doubling the U.S. troop presence there.
In Baghdad, workers toiled to tidy the royal mausoleum ahead of the return to Iraq Tuesday of Sharif Ali bin Hussein, a cousin of the last king, Faisal II, for the first time since a 1958 revolution overthrew the British-backed monarchy.
Sharif will add a new element to the political ferment of postwar Iraq as the U.S. and British occupying powers try to create an interim Iraqi administration to help run the country. |
