Three Japanese hostages were freed yesterday, but the murders of an Iranian diplomat and an Italian captive sent chilling proof of the risks foreigners face in Iraq, where rebels are battling the US-led occupation.
Al Jazeera television showed the three Japanese, apparently in good health, after they had been handed over to the Muslim Clerics Association, a Sunni Muslim body, in Baghdad.
PHOTO:EPA
"I'm very happy they have been released," said a senior member of the association, Abdul Salam al-Kubaysi. "I call on them to visit Fallujah again to see for themselves the havoc wreaked on the city by US warplanes and cluster bombs."
Fallujah has seen fierce fighting this month between US Marines and Sunni insurgents. Hospital officials said more than 600 people have been killed in the city west of Baghdad.
Japan has endured a week of anguish since the kidnappers threatened to kill the three hostages unless Tokyo withdrew its troops from Iraq. Japan rejected the demand.
Italy has also vowed to keep its troops in Iraq despite the murder of one of four Italian hostages held there.
"They have destroyed a life. They have not cracked our values and our efforts for peace," Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said after the killing of Fabrizio Quattrocchi.
The freed hostages are Noriaki Imai, 18, who wanted to research the effects of depleted uranium weapons, journalist Soichiro Koriyama, 32, and aid worker Nahoko Takato, 34.
Japanese authorities were trying to confirm reports that two more Japanese civilians had been kidnapped near Baghdad.
Underscoring the lawlessness sweeping Iraq, an Iranian diplomat was killed near the Iranian mission in Baghdad. Iran state television named him as first secretary Khalil Naimi.
A Reuters correspondent saw a car with at least two bullet holes in it. A body was slumped in the vehicle, which had smashed into a lamp-post.
"We have been told that he was driving his car to go to the embassy and three men drove up and shot him," an Iranian official said in Baghdad.
An Iranian delegation has been in Iraq to help mediate between US-led authorities and Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
US troops are poised around the Shiite holy city of Najaf, where Sadr is holed up. The US has vowed to kill or capture the rebel cleric and destroy his militia.
In Fallujah, residents said US planes struck targets in several districts amid overnight clashes between rebels and US Marines. There was no word on casualties.
Fighting calmed after daybreak, though Marine tanks opened fire after a rebel attack outside the town, witnesses said, and four insurgents were killed 16km to the north.
Al Jazeera television received a videotape of the Italian private security guard's murder, which it said was too bloody to screen.
The killing of the Italian by a previously unheard-of Iraqi group followed a kidnap spree that has snared foreigners from a dozen countries this month, the bloodiest since former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was ousted a year ago.
It was the first such publicized killing.
Kidnappers freed French journalist Alexandre Jourdanov on Wednesday, but more than a dozen foreigners remain captive.
Al Jazeera said their captors had threatened to kill three other Italian hostages, colleagues of Quattrocchi in a US security firm, if Italian troops were not withdrawn immediately.
Berlusconi, a loyal ally of US President George W. Bush, sent almost 3,000 troops to Iraq, where bloodshed and kidnapping have rattled other countries with troops or workers there.
Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo told officials to prepare contingency plans to evacuate some 3,000 Filipinos, but said peacekeepers and aid workers would stay for now.
About 20 buses carrying Russian workers headed for the airport in an evacuation organized after the kidnapping and swift release of three Russians and five Ukrainians in Baghdad.
The US military, fighting on two fronts against Sunni rebels and Sadr's Mehdi Army militia, has lost at least 93 troops in combat since March 31 -- four more than the total killed in the three-week war that toppled Saddam.
There have been intense efforts by Shiite clerics to broker a deal between Sadr and the Americans that would spare Najaf a bloodbath.
A negotiator for Sadr said on Wednesday the cleric had offered unconditional talks, but a senior official with the US-led authorities declined comment on any negotiations.
In Baquba, north of Baghdad, two rockets hit houses at dawn, killing a mother and two teenage sons and badly wounding two daughters. It was not clear who had fired the rockets.
The bloody chaos in Iraq has shown how hard Washington is finding the task of stabilizing the country it invaded to destroy Saddam's still unfound weapons of mass destruction.
Bush, seeking re-election in November with opponents accusing him of leading the US into a Vietnam-style quagmire, vowed on Tuesday to stay the course in Iraq and stick to a June 30 handover of power to Iraqis.
The stretched US military has decided to keep more than 20,000 troops in Iraq beyond their year-long tours of duty.
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
STEADFAST DART: The six-week exercise, which involves about 10,000 troops from nine nations, focuses on rapid deployment scenarios and multidomain operations NATO is testing its ability to rapidly deploy across eastern Europe — without direct US assistance — as Washington shifts its approach toward European defense and the war in Ukraine. The six-week Steadfast Dart 2025 exercises across Bulgaria, Romania and Greece are taking place as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches the three-year mark. They involve about 10,000 troops from nine nations and represent the largest NATO operation planned this year. The US absence from the exercises comes as European nations scramble to build greater military self-sufficiency over their concerns about the commitment of US President Donald Trump’s administration to common defense and
RSS