Naseer Al-Nahr, Asharq Al-Awsat

BAGHDAD, 28 September 2003 — Guerrillas struck a glancing but bold blow at the heart of the US occupation yesterday, firing three rockets or grenades at a Baghdad hotel filled with American soldiers and civilians. To the west, in flashpoint Fallujah, US troops killed at least four Iraqi civilians in yet one more nighttime encounter on the local highway.

The US military said the Fallujah victims had tried to run a checkpoint, but later altered that to say the Iraqis had fired on American soldiers. Wounded survivors said the American fire was unprovoked and came from troops lying in ambush. They said four Iraqis were killed, latest in a string of dozens shot by US troops in the Euphrates River town.

The US administration would like to have thousands of additional non-American troops to help relieve the Iraq security burden on the US Army. “All nations of good will should do their part as well,” President George W. Bush said in a US radio address yesterday. But even Bangladesh, long a ready source of Muslim peacekeeping troops, has turned down the idea of dispatching soldiers to Iraq. Like many other governments, it opposed the US war here.

The attack on the Al-Rashid Hotel, once one of Baghdad’s best, now home to US military officers and civilian occupation officials, came at about 6:30 a.m., when someone fired three or four projectiles, apparently from a nearby residential area, US military spokesmen said.

Rounds struck the 14th floor and caused superficial damage, said Charles Heatley, spokesman for the occupation office, the Coalition Provisional Authority. Another round struck a one-story private home near the hotel, leaving a sizable hole. No injuries were reported.

“It did wake us up with a bang,” Heatley said. But “we are not unduly concerned about this.” It was, nonetheless, the most daring known attack by resistance fighters on the so-called “green zone,” a heavily guarded area of closed-off streets in central Baghdad where US occupation authorities live and work.

At the eastern edge of Fallujah, 50 kilometers west of Baghdad, soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division manning a position on the eastbound side of the main highway to the capital opened fire on a motorbike and then a following pickup truck headed west into Fallujah, surviving witnesses reported.

Haidar Jamil, 17, wounded in the left leg and back, said from his hospital bed that his father, mother and grandmother were killed in the pickup. A fourth person, a man on the motorbike, also was killed, said Capt. Taha Al-Falahi, security chief of the Fallujah General Hospital. Military spokesman Krivo said his reports were that two were killed and four wounded. An initial report from the US military said soldiers fired on a vehicle that ran a checkpoint. Krivo later amended that to say, “There was a van involved. There were shots fired from the van on the traffic control point, and the coalition soldiers returned fire.”

— Additional input from agencies