Naseer Al-Nahr • Arab News

BAGHDAD, 24 June 2004 — A recording purportedly made by the mastermind of bombings and beheadings in Iraq threatened to assassinate Iraq’s interim prime minister and fight the Americans “until Islamic rule is back on Earth.” The audio, found yesterday on a militant website, is supposedly from Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born terrorist whose group claimed responsibility for the beheading of American hostage Nicholas Berg and Kim Sun-il, a South Korean whose decapitated body was found Tuesday between Baghdad and Fallujah.

After the slaying, US forces launched an airstrike on what the Americans said was an Al-Zarqawi hide-out in Fallujah. Yesterday, a senior coalition military official said 20 foreign fighters and terrorists were believed to have been killed in the Tuesday night strike. The official briefed reporters on condition of anonymity.

Dr. Loai Ali Zeidan at Fallujah Hospital put the death toll at three with nine wounded. It was the second US airstrike on Fallujah since Saturday. “In both cases, we believe we hit significant numbers of Al-Zarqawi lieutenants and Al-Zarqawi fighters,” another official, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, said. The airstrikes also destroyed large ammunition stores, Kimmitt, coalition deputy operations chief, said yesterday.

South Koreans reacted with sorrow and anger to Kim’s beheading yesterday, with President Roh Moo-hyun calling it a “crime against humanity.” Kim’s body was found two days after he appeared on a videotape broadcast by Al-Jazeera television, pleading “I don’t want to die,” and begging his government to pull its soldiers out of Iraq.

South Korea refused and said it would go ahead with plans to send another 3,000 soldiers here by August, which will make it the third-largest troop contributor after the United States and Britain. “When we think of his desperate appeals for life, our hearts are wrenched with grief,” Roh said yesterday in a national television address.

In the audiotape, the speaker thought to be Zarqawi told Iraq’s interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi that “we will continue the game with you until the end.” The speaker said “we will not get bored” until “we make you drink from the same glass” as Ezzidine Salim, the Iraqi Governing Council president killed last month in a car bombing claimed by Zarqawi’s group. “We will carry on our jihad against the Western infidel and the Arab apostate until Islamic rule is back on Earth,” the voice said.

An official with Allawi’s office dismissed the threat, saying it would not derail the transfer of sovereignty next week.

President Bush called Allawi to “reiterate his commitment to the Iraqi people,” said White House spokesman Scott McClellan. During the call, which was scheduled before the Zarqawi statement, Allawi raised the topic of the assassination threat, McClellan said.

McClellan did not provide Bush’s response but said Allawi “is determined to confront these terrorist threats.”

Elsewhere, a roadside bomb exploded near Baghdad’s Kindi Hospital yesterday, killing a policeman who was handling the bomb and a mother and her child who were riding in a taxi, Iraqi police said. Another man, his shirt off, was seen being led away in handcuffs.

In Ramadi, 100 kilometers (60 miles) west of Baghdad, gunmen killed two policemen and wounded a third in a drive-by shooting, witnesses said.

A roadside bomb also exploded as an Iraqi National Guard patrol passed in the northern city of Mosul, killing one Iraqi soldier and wounding four others, the US military said.