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End to sanctions { April 16 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38802-2003Apr16.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38802-2003Apr16.html
As War Winds Down, Bush Calls for End to Sanctions
Washington's Focus Shifts but Dangers Remain in Iraq
By Thomas W. Lippman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 16, 2003; 2:45 PM
Abundant signs that the war in Iraq is coming to a successful conclusion popped up all over Washington today as the national terrorism threat level was lowered from orange to yellow, President Bush departed for a long weekend at his Texas ranch and a smiling Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld introduced a country music band at a Pentagon concert honoring U.S. troops.
With Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein now removed from power, the United States asked the United Nations Security Council to lift the economic sanctions imposed on his government after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Removal of the sanctions would allow whatever new government emerges in Iraq to export oil without restrictions and trade freely on world markets.
An exuberant Bush was unable to suppress a grin as he hailed the Iraq triumph in a speech to cheering aircraft workers in Missouri, where he stopped on his way to Crawford, Tex. "The successes of our military begin right here on the factory floors," Bush told the Boeing Co. workers, who make the F/A-18 combat jet. The speed and totality of the U.S. and British victory over a battle-hardened enemy, he said, show that "by a combination of creative strategies and advanced technologies, we are redefining war on our terms."
On the ground in Iraq, the atmosphere was considerably less relaxed as U.S. troops struggled to restore order and deliver public services to an impatient and sometimes hostile population.
With relief convoys rolling and some police officers returning to the streets, the hardships and lawlessness that have bedeviled Iraq's 24 million people since the collapse of the government a week ago have begun to recede. But events around the country demonstrated again the magnitude of the task facing the U.S. military in a brittle political, religious and ethnic environment.
"Dangers remain," Army Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks said in daily military briefing at U.S. Central Command field headquarters in Doha, Qatar, "and our coalition soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and civilians continue to confront them with courage and compassion."
Even in Baghdad, which U.S. troops entered in force more than a week ago, large areas of the city remain essentially beyond the control of any authority and may still harbor troops and militiamen loyal to the deposed president Saddam Hussein, Brooks said. "The remaining areas in Baghdad that have not yet been cleared are all suspected to harbor armed regime loyalists," he said.
An NBC television correspondent in the capital reported hearing "nearly nonstop gunfire" throughout the day. Iraqis who object to the reappearance on the streets of police officers who worked for the Hussein government demonstrated against them in large numbers.
In the violence-plagued, ethnically divided northern city of Mosul, at least three people were reported killed in a burst of gunfire that local citizens said came from American weapons.
The reported shooting in an open market near the center of the city came a day after at least seven Iraqis died in a firefight with U.S. Marines. In that incident, Marines opened fire on a mob trying to scale the wall around a compound where the U.S. military was setting up an administrative post, military officials said.
These encounters appeared to represent exactly the sort of urban conflict that U.S. officials had feared they would face as troops entered Iraqi cities. U.S. commanders have stressed since the beginning of the war a month ago that their planning aimed at minimizing civilian casualties, but with the collapse of government authority U.S. troops are confronting a fractious population in an environment where weapons are plentiful and it is difficult to distinguish true civilians from former military personnel who have doffed their uniforms.
Confirming news accounts of Tuesday's shooting, Brooks said that the Marines faced an increasingly angry crowd as they entered a former government building that they intended to use as "a regional coordinating center, a place where people could come and meet and do the business that's necessary for creating a stable environment." The Iraqis threw stones and fists at the Marines and spat at them, Brooks said, and shouted anti-American slogans.
At first, he said, armed Iraqis in the crowd fired into the air, but then they turned their weapons against the Marines. "Fire was directed at the Marines and Special Operations forces in the complex," he said. "It was aimed fire, and aimed fire was returned against some of the demonstrators, against some of the agitated persons who were now climbing over the wall of the compound. Fire was indeed delivered from coalition forces. It was lethal fire, and some Iraqis were killed as a result of that," he said.
He put the number of dead at seven, but some news accounts said at least 10 Iraqi men died. There is no indication yet who they were, but Mosul—a city of about 1.5 million residents—has been a stronghold of Arab nationalism and of militias loyal to Hussein.
If members of such militias are wearing civilian clothes and firing at U.S. troops in public places where civilians congregate, the distinction between civilian and military casualties becomes virtually meaningless to the troops taking fire.
Brooks said U.S. forces and cooperative local officials have established a "permissive security environment" in four major cities of northern Iraq—Irbil, Kirkuk, Sulaymaniyah and Dahuk. In Mosul, however, "electric power has been disrupted, and there have been recent incidents of violent civil unrest. Our efforts continue to lower the tension ..... and to create a permissive environment there as well," he said.
Just as he was speaking, news reports came in of the other lethal shooting incident today. Initial accounts of the incident were unclear as to who was shooting at whom, and why. According to the Reuters news agency, the gunfire erupted as local police, who have returned to duty under U.S. military supervision, were trying to prevent the looting of a bank.
Six people wounded in the shooting told a reporter that Americans shot them, but a Marine sergeant identified only as "Chet" denied that Marines had fired into the crowd.
An administrator at Mosul's Jumhuriya (Republic) Hospital said three people had been killed and 11 wounded, including two children.
And despite Brooks’s report of stability in major northern cities other than Mosul, journalists in the north reported an outbreak of killings of Arabs and ethnic Turkmen, apparently by Kurds based in the Kurdish autonomous region near the Turkish border.
On the outskirts of Baghdad, U.S. troops discovered what appeared to be a recently abandoned training camp for terrorists where recruits were apparently taught how to make bombs and what to do if captured, the Associated Press reported. The extensive camp consisted of 25 buildings and was operated jointly by the Iraqi government and a Palestinian group, the Palestine Liberation Front, according to Cpl. John Hoellwarth, a Marine spokesman.
In Baghdad, U.S. Special Forces raided the home of Rahib Taha, a microbiologist known as "Dr. Germ" who ran Iraq's secret microbiological laboratory and is suspected of having helped to produce biological weapons. Troops brought out boxes of documents and three men with their hands up, but not her, the AP reported.
Fears that Iraqi defenders would use biological or chemical weapons have receded with the collapse of organized resistance to U.S. and British troops. Bulgaria's Defense Ministry said that country had been planning to send a military unit specializing in defense against biological warfare, but has dropped the idea because it is no longer necessary. Instead, the country has been asked by the United States to contribute troops to a conventional peacekeeping force and will probably do so, a Defense Ministry spokeswoman said.
Several other European countries, at a meeting in Athens, also discussed sending troops for a peacekeeping force. "There is a desperate need for stabilization forces in Iraq, here and now," Danish Prime Minister Anders Rasmussen told reporters at a European Union summit meeting. "We cannot wait for a U.N. resolution."
He and the leaders of the Netherlands and Spain said Iraq needs to be stabilized quickly, without an extensive period of haggling over who should have overall authority for peacekeeping and reconstruction.
Lowering of the terrorism threat level in the United States was announced on the White House Web site. "Following a review of intelligence and an assessment of threats by the intelligence community, the Department of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Homeland Security Council, has made the decision to lower the threat advisory level to an elevated risk of terrorist attack, or 'yellow level,'." the announcement said.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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