Washington accuses Izzat Ibrahim of coordinating anti-U.S. attacks in Iraq

Additional Reporting by Subhy Haddad, IOL correspondent

BAGHDAD, October 31 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - The United Nations announced Thursday, October 30, it would pull its foreign staff out of Baghdad, while a Pentagon official accused a former Iraqi general and key henchman of Saddam Hussein of coordinating anti-U.S. attacks in Iraq.

On Friday, October 31, security was high Iraqis flocked to mosques for weekly prayers amid fears of a new wave of attacks while Washington sped up its hiring of Iraqi security forces.

The UN announcement followed a similar one by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which said it was slashing foreign staff in Iraq after a truck bomb killed two of its employees and devastated its Baghdad offices Monday.

"We have asked Baghdad staff to come out temporarily for consultation with people from headquarters on the future of our operations," said U.N. spokeswoman Marie Heuze in Geneva, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).

The United States glumly accepted the withdrawals, conceding it could not argue with the rationale behind the decisions.

"Everyone, every individual and every organization has to decide for themselves what they're going to do and how they're going to conduct themselves," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters in Washington.

"There's no doubt that terrorists are attempting to drive them out. And it appears that, at least with respect to some organizations, they're being successful."

"There aren't short-term fixes to these problems," he added.

Heuze said the decision to leave only affects international workers in Baghdad and not those in the northern city of Arbil.

The ICRC also said its expatriate staff were headed out of Iraq to discuss the details of the scale down ordered by the agency following Monday's bomb.

"All expatriates will leave Iraq today or tomorrow to meet for a few days in a neighboring country with directors from Geneva," ICRC spokeswoman Nada Doumani said in Baghdad.

"We will examine who must stay and we will determine what activities they will pursue," she said.

Doumani said the review of staffing levels would last less than a week but declined to say where it would be held.

She stressed that some of the staff would return, following the agency's decision Wednesday to scale back, not fully withdraw its expatriate personnel.

Hunting Saddam Official

"There aren't short-term fixes to these problems," Rumsfeld

Meanwhile, a U.S. defense official in Washington said a former Iraqi general, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, is believed to be coordinating attacks in Iraq by what the official termed “foreign fighters and Saddam loyalists”.

The reports fingering al-Douri as the coordinator of the attacks probably came from the recent capture, in the northern city of Mosul, of one of his former secretaries and two senior members of Ansar al-Islam, a group linked by Washington to al-Qaeda, the official said, according to AFP.

Amid a recent upsurge in violence, 117 U.S. soldiers have now been killed since U.S. President George W. Bush declared major hostilities over on May 1 - more than those killed during the war itself.

Security Tight, Tensions High

In Baghdad, security was tight as Iraqis headed to mosques for Friday prayers.

Further adding to the tension, U.S. authorities warned Americans there were "rumors" of renewed threats in the Iraqi capital.

"There are a number of rumors of a 'day resistance' throughout Baghdad on Saturday and Sunday, November 1 and 2," the U.S. consular office said in a statement.

"U.S. citizens are encouraged to continue to maintain a high level of vigilance and continue to take appropriate steps to increase their security awareness," it said.

Attacks on U.S. forces also surged, reaching a daily average of 33 over a week, as compared with 25 the previous week.

A massive explosion, presumably caused by an explosive charge, has destroyed two apartment buildings in the center of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad Thursday night, killing 2 persons and seriously wounding 8 others, eyewitnesses told IslamOnline.net.

They said the explosions also caused a huge fire in both buildings and the fire stretched to a number of supermarkets and shops surrounding the two destroyed buildings, but some eyewitnesses said the incident could have occurred due to a gas cylinder fire and not a subversive act.  They did not elaborate.

Iraqi firefighters rushed to the site of the two destroyed buildings to extinguish the huge fire caused by the explosion.

In another development, Iraqi resistance attacks continued through the day against U.S. military convoys in Baghdad and some other Iraqi cities.

At least 3 U.S. convoys came under RPG and mortar raids launched by Iraqi fighters, killing at least 3 U.S. soldiers and wounding an unspecified number of others in different parts of Baghdad, namely the northern part of the city and the western part.

Eyewitnesses said that at least one U.S. army Hammer vehicle was destroyed in one of the attacks on a U.S. army convoy, some 10 kms to the northwest of the center of Baghdad.

U.S. Deploys More Iraqis

In a related development, U.S. commanders are accelerating the deployment of Iraqi security forces in response to a surge of bombing attacks that have prompted major international organizations to pull staff out of Baghdad.

Acknowledging the gravity of Washington’s growing crisis in Iraq, Rumsfeld said, "There aren't short-term fixes to these problems. The attacker has the advantage. And that is why the task is to root out terrorists and terrorist organizations where they are, to find them and to capture them or kill them."

Rumsfeld added that the number of Iraqis deployed so far in the various security forces has climbed to more than 100,000 and will soon surpass the 130,000 U.S. troops in the country.

The 100,000 mark represents a jump of about 40,000 in less than a month, according to figures Rumsfeld has cited in past interviews and press conferences, reported AFP.

Just two days ago, he put the number of Iraqi security forces at about 90,000.

Civil defense units and a guard force to protect infrastructure around the country have grown the fastest because they require less training than either the army or the police, which have taken longer to train and equip, a senior defense official said.

The race to field Iraqi security forces was launched late last summer amid growing criticism in Washington that the Pentagon had failed to deploy enough U.S. troops to pacify the country.

But coordinated suicide bombings Monday targeting Baghdad offices of the International Red Cross and Iraqi police stations have highlighted the urgency of the situation.

President George W. Bush has told the Pentagon to revamp and accelerate plans to put Iraqis on the streets of Baghdad and other places where U.S. forces have come under attack, the New York Times reported.

"I mean, you don't get from zero to 100,000-plus Iraqis involved just by sitting around thinking about it," Rumsfeld said.

"You add money. You set higher goals. You increase the number of Iraqis who are helping you doing the recruiting. You increase the number of countries who assist you with the training. And you adjust your techniques as to where you put your emphasis within those five or six categories," he said.

But he acknowledged that the rush to fill the ranks of the Iraqi security forces carried risks.

Ideally, people should be subjected to a year-long vetting process before being accepted into the security forces, he said.

"Unfortunately, we're not in the perfect world," he said. "So what we do is we vet them to the best we can."