Naseer Al-Nahr, Asharq Al-Awsat

BAGHDAD, 13 September 2003 — On a day of bloodshed, US troops killed 10 Iraqi policemen and a Jordanian hospital guard in friendly fire in Fallujah near Baghdad. Just miles down the road and a few hours later two American soldiers were killed and 11 wounded in a series of attacks.

The attacks came after two Iraqis, described as the sons of a local Sunni tribal chief, were shot dead and a third was wounded when their car failed to stop at a US checkpoint outside Fallujah late Thursday.

An American military statement said one US soldier and five “neutral individuals” were wounded in an attack near the Jordanian Hospital in Fallujah, 50 km (30 miles) west of Baghdad. The military said US soldiers were fired on with a rocket-propelled grenade and small arms.

In Jordan, Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher received a phone call from US Secretary of State Colin Powell expressing regret for the incident which killed the Jordanian guard at the field hospital where the incident occurred.

In an attack against US forces near Fallujah, a US convoy came under fire in the Halabasa area, about 3 km (1.8 miles) west of that city in the afternoon. The firefight between the Americans and the Iraqi resistance lasted about 30 minutes, eyewitnesses said. A damaged civilian car and a burning US truck could be seen on the road.

The violence was not restricted to areas around Fallujah, where guerrilla attacks on US forces are a near-daily occurrence.

A 45-minute gunbattle erupted in central Baghdad where police chased and captured three members of a suspected carjacking gang.

In the incident at the Jordanian Hospital on the western outskirts of Fallujah, 25 policemen in three vehicles were chasing a white BMW known to have been used by highway bandits. One unmarked police pickup truck carried a heavy machine gun, while another pickup truck and a car were painted white and blue — the color of Iraqi police vehicles. The dead Iraqis were in police uniform.

The police said they lost their quarry just after midnight and decided to turn around near the hospital. The driver of one car, 19-year-old policeman Arkan Adnan, said the appearance of the armed Iraqi police pickup truck may have prompted the Americans to fire.

Anger boiled over in Fallujah as residents pressed the US military for both information and the victims’ bodies after the shooting. Relatives and residents staged furious demonstrations outside the governor’s office and police headquarters amid predictions of a new wave of violence against Americans in the town. “Now we can expect that attacks will increase, because you will have not only what they call the resistance, but also the families of these 10 dead people and everyone else wanting to take revenge against the Americans,” said police First Lt. Mahmoud Hussein.

He was referring to the strong tribal loyalties which still dominate this deeply conservative Sunni Muslim town and require clansmen to avenge their own.

Ghazwan Khalaf, 19, whose brother Abdul Rahman was one of the 10 police auxiliaries killed in the shooting, gave a similar warning. “Before, the Americans just had the resistance to worry about, now they have also got the Iraqi police who used to be their allies,” he said.

Lt. Hussein said he believed the Americans were aware of the anger they had stoked up in the town which was why they were being so slow to hand over the victims for burial.