WASHINGTON, October 28 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - As the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Tuesday, October 28, prepared to pull out of Iraq after a series of massive attacks, the United States urged international aid agencies not to leave the war-ravaged country because their work is needed.

The ICRC said Monday it "will begin tomorrow to fly out expatriate staff and then we'll see how we can continue our work with our Iraqi staff," Pierre Gassmann, head of the ICRC delegation in Baghdad, told the website of Germany's ARD public television.

The organization, which has some 35 foreign staff in Iraq and 800 Iraqi workers, would continue not to ask for military protection, Gassmann said.

"If we decide to ask for military protection, we will be exactly where the enemy is seen - at the side of the coalition troops," Gassmann was quoted by Agence France-Presse (AFP) as saying.

Gassmann said the strategy of trying to distance the organization from the U.S.-led troops occupying Iraq had failed.

"The people who did this are against everything foreign. They see no difference: everything that isn't Iraqi is lumped in with the occupying troops and fought," he said.

The ICRC would remain on the spot but reduce its work, "for example on water supplies, help for hospitals, distributing medicines."

"The problem is just that there isn't a civilian Iraqi administration yet that can fulfill such tasks," he added.

Staff at the agency's headquarters in Geneva were in a state of shock, fearing that it had been deliberately targeted in the attack.

Other aid agencies rallied around the ICRC, which prides itself on its neutrality and has stayed in Iraq for more than two decades and through several wars, to provide help while others had intermittently pulled out of the country.

"We are very shocked by this terrorist attack because the target of the attack was the very symbol of humanitarian aid in Iraq," said Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

"It means that one of the interests of these people is to expel every foreigner," she told AFP.

The ICRC normally relies on discreet contact with all sides in a conflict to try to make sure its delivery of medical and sanitary aid, and assistance to prisoners, is seen as impartial, officials said.

Security for its foreign and local employees worldwide also depends heavily on the internationally-recognized symbols, the red cross and the red crescent.

In the meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell appealed for international aid agencies to work with U.S. authorities to find a way to stay despite its dangers.

"They are needed, their work is needed and if they are driven out then the terrorists win," he said after meeting at the State Department with Sheikh Hamdan Bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, the deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates.

Powell allowed that the agencies "have to balance that desire to do the job and stay with their security needs”, but called on them to seek the assistance of Paul Bremer, the head of the U.S. civil administration in Iraq, and General Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq.

Powell acknowledged that Monday's bombings, which followed the shelling on Sunday of the Baghdad hotel where U.S. officials reside, had been bad for morale, but vowed that the United States would stay the course in Iraq.

"Today was a difficult day and the last 24 hours have been very difficult," he said.

But Powell's comments may not be helpful, and unlike U.S occupation authorities and the military, aid workers cannot surround themselves with intense security, said the BBC NewsOnline.

A clear line from Washington that agencies should stay could appear to compromise their neutrality, it added.

The prospect of key humanitarian organizations further scaling back, may add to the growing feeling in the U.S. that the rest of the world has not been properly involved in sharing the cost of rebuilding Iraq, said the BBC NewsOnline.

Critics, including Democratic presidential candidates, said the surge in violence only bolstered their view that post-invasion Iraq was a mess.

But President George W. Bush talked tough in the face of Monday's deadly blasts, insisting that violent challenges would not change the U.S. mission in Iraq.

"The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react. And our job is to find them and bring them to justice," he said.

Following the Monday attacks, the Iraqi Education Ministry ordered all schools indefinitely closed” to keep safe all students in these turbulent times.

In a separately-related incident, the U.S. troops killed 7 Iraqis, hours after the Monday attacks.

U.S. soldiers who were in a convoy that suffered from an attack by an explosive charge on a bridge in the western town of Fallujah Monday evening, opened sporadic fire on a number of Iraqis killing 7 of them and wounding several others, eyewitnesses told IslamOnline.net Tuesday, October 28.

They added that the U.S. convoy lost 3 of its armored vehicles, but they gave no further details about human losses among the U.S. soldiers.