Naseer Al-Nahr, Asharq Al-Awsa

BAGHDAD, 6 November 2003 — The governor of the central province of Najaf called for an open-ended general strike yesterday that shut down public offices in protest at the lack of security after a judge was shot dead.

Governor Haidar Mehdi Matar Al-Mayyali issued the strike call after a meeting with Robert Ford, representative of Paul Bremer, the US overseer in Iraq, and an officer from the multinational forces controlling the region. “The general strike starts today and will continue until all the demands are satisfied, all the demands made by the judges, lawyers and other sectors of society,” he told reporters.

US forces in the northern city of Mosul came under attack yesterday as resistance fighters fired rocket-propelled grenades at a convoy and a military compound, and a hand grenade exploded near another convoy in the town center.

Two Iraqi civilians died when a rocket propelled round struck their car after apparently missing a military convoy, Sgt. Chris Ryder said. And an Iraqi teenager was killed in the grenade blast near Mosul’s city hall, hospital sources said. Two others were slightly injured.

Two US soldiers also were wounded in those incidents, the military said. No casualties were reported in an earlier attack on a barracks by resistance fighters using rocket-propelled grenades, the US military said.

Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, had been relatively quiet in the past several months, but the security situation has deteriorated since October.

The continuing attacks by shadowy groups of Iraqi resistance fighters have cast doubt on the ability of the US-led coalition to contain the growing resistance, and have sparked an exodus from Baghdad of international organizations and diplomats from several Western countries.

Spain, a close US ally, withdrew several of its diplomatic staff yesterday because of escalating violence. In Madrid, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said six staffers had been sent to Amman, Jordan, while eight members of the embassy remained in Baghdad.

Two other coalition members have withdrawn diplomats from Iraq because of stepped-up resistance attacks. Last month, Bulgaria and the Netherlands moved their diplomats to Jordan, also citing worsening security.

Meanwhile, soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division captured two former Iraqi Army generals in an early morning raid yesterday in Fallujah, the military said. It said the two men were suspected of being “key financiers” and organizers of anti-coalition fighters operating in and around the city of Fallujah.

And in a separate incident, a US soldier died of wounds sustained from a “non-hostile gunshot” at a checkpoint in Baghdad, the military said.

Britain’s Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon also said that the security situation in Iraq remains a concern, but he insisted most parts of the country and the capital Baghdad were “very calm.”

The Defense Ministry announced Tuesday that a British marine was killed by hostile fire in Iraq last week, bringing the British death toll since the war started to 52.