[A-List] Iraq: the quagmire deepens

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

19 US soldiers killed in attack on Iraq base
WILLIAM TINNING
The Herald, December 22 2004

Nineteen US soldiers and three other people were killed in an explosion in a
dining hall at a base in Mosul yesterday in the single deadliest attack on
American forces since the coalition invasion of Iraq.

The bombing, at a mess tent as lunch was being served, came as Tony Blair
made a surprise visit to Baghdad. More than 60 others were injured.

One US military official said it was caused by a mortar or rocket strike but
a statement attributed to the Ansar al Sunna militant group on an Islamist
website said one of its suicide bombers carried out the attack.

Ansar al Sunna is believed to be a fundamentalist group whose goal is to
turn Iraq into a tightly controlled Islamic state similar to Afghanistan's
former Taliban regime. Last August, the Sunni Muslim group claimed
responsibility for the beheading of 12 Nepalese hostages.

The attack was part of an upsurge of violence in the run-up to the Iraqi
elections planned for January 30.

Mr Blair held talks with Iraqi leaders during his first visit to Baghdad,
where he arrived at the heavily-fortified Green Zone by helicopter, flanked
by US Black Hawk and Apache gunships. The prime minister later said the war
on insurgents would be won and elections would proceed as planned.

As Mr Blair left, mortars fell on the Green Zone compound, as they do almost
daily. However, there appeared to be no casualties.

Adding to the US problems yesterday were fresh allegations of serious
mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by US military personnel, which have emerged
as part of a lawsuit against the US government.

However, in Paris, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the French prime minister, told
parliament that two French journalists held by militants for four months had
been released and were on their way home for Christmas.

The Mosul strike came at noon when many soldiers at Forward Operating Base
Marez, a huge camp built around the city's airfield, were at lunch. The
dining hall, made of canvas and metal, can seat hundreds.

Jeremy Redmon, a journalist with the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia,
who is embedded with troops in Iraq, said the force of the explosions
knocked soldiers out of their seats. He said a fireball enveloped the top of
the tent, and shrapnel sprayed into the men. Amid the screaming and thick
smoke that followed, quick-thinking soldiers turned their lunch tables
upside down, placed the wounded on them, and gently carried them into the
car park.

Brigadier General Carter Ham, commander of the 8000 US troops based in
Mosul, said: "It is indeed a very, very sad day.

"The killed include US military personnel, US contractors, foreign national
contractors and Iraqi army."

Concern had recently been expressed that the military dining hall was
vulnerable to attack. A US Army colonel said he feared what would happen if
insurgents managed to fire rockets into it.

Although the hall was shielded by towering concrete walls, it had no
protected roof.

The US Army was building a more fortified dining hall nearby.

Mosul has been the site of a surge in violence over the past six weeks since
US forces launched an offensive against insurgents in Falluja, west of
Baghdad, in an assault designed to break the back of the guerrilla movement
before the election.

In the bloodiest previous single incident for US troops in Iraq, two Black
Hawk helicopters crashed in Mosul in November last year, killing 17
soldiers. At the start of the war in March, last year, 29 soldiers were
killed in a fierce day of fighting.

Last Sunday, insurgents detonated two roadside bombs and a car bomb
targeting US forces in Mosul in three separate attacks during a two-hour
period. Other car bombs on Sunday killed 67 people in the Shi'ite holy cites
of Najaf and Kerbala.