International organizations continued their exodus from Iraq, with the UN announcing it was withdrawing staff from Baghdad following this week's string of car bombings in the capital and attacks against coalition troops.
Insurgents kept up their attacks against US and other targets, blasting a freight train carrying military supplies near Fallujah west of Baghdad. An improvised bomb caused no casualties but set four containers ablaze and sparked a frenzy of looting by residents who carried off computers, tents, bottled water and other supplies.
A soldier from the 2nd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division was slightly injured early yesterday when a bomb exploded near a US convoy in the northern city of Mosul, the military said.
The exodus of humanitarian workers came despite assurances by top US administration officials, including US President George W. Bush, that the security situation in Iraq was steadily improving. It also followed a personal appeal by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the international Red Cross to remain in Baghdad because "if they are driven out, then the terrorists win."
The UN decision to pull its remaining international staff out of Baghdad was announced on Wednesday, two days after a deadly suicide car bombing at the Baghdad headquarters of the Red Cross.
"We have asked our staff in Baghdad to come out temporarily for consultations with a team from headquarters on the future of our operations, in particular security arrangements that we would need to take to operate in Iraq," UN spokeswoman Marie Okabe said.
She said it was not an "evacuation" and staff in the north would remain.
Okabe declined to give more details but about 60 UN staff members were believed to be in Iraq, including some 20 in Baghdad, after Secretary-General Kofi Annan ordered most others out in late September.
The UN scaled down its staff following the Aug. 19 truck bombing at its Baghdad headquarters that killed 23 people, including the top UN envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and a smaller blast near the UN offices last month.
Also Wednesday, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the humanitarian group Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Borders, said they too were pulling their workers out of Baghdad despite pleas from the US administration to stay.
The Red Cross said it would remain in Iraq but would scale back the number of international staff -- now numbering about 30 -- and increase security for those who stay. The agency has 600 Iraqi employees.
Asked yesterday about US pleas for the ICRC to stay put, the organization's Baghdad spokeswoman Nada Doumani said: "The ICRC will take its decision independently as it always had."
US forces are now suffering an average of 33 attacks a day -- up from about 12 daily attacks in July. A total of 117 American soldiers have been killed in combat since May 1 -- when Bush declared an end to major fighting -- or slightly more than the 114 soldiers who died in the invasion that began March 20.
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