crushing a rapidly spreading anti-American uprising in the Sunni Muslim stronghold of Fallujah, giving residents in the besieged city a chance to burry their dead and to treat the wounded after nearly a week of fighting killed hundreds of people, including Christians, reports said.
It came as a group of South Korean missionaries enjoyed their first day in freedom after armed Iraqi rebels took them and two Arab residents of Israel as hostages, including one working for an American aid agency. The Arabs were accused of being Israeli agents, news reports said. One missionary escaped and the other seven evangelical Christians were reportedly released after displaying their medical skills and leaving $30,000 in cash with their kidnappers.
The evangelical Christians had left in two cars on April 5 from Amman, Jordan, when they were seized by gunmen about 155 miles (248 kilometers) east of Baghdad, said one of the freed South Koreans. Our reporter who traveled in the same area learned that roads in the area have often been targeted by bandits amid complaints from Iraqis that the coalition forces are often retreating from the most dangerous areas on the dessert high ways.
Earlier this week, two South Korean aid workers were briefly detained by Shiites in a gunbattle with Italian peacekeepers, but later released unharmed. However insurgents still hold at least six foreigners, including three Japanese hostages, as bargaining chips, the French News Agency (AFP) reported Friday April 9. The kidnappers gave Japan’s government until 9 p.m. Tokyo time on Sunday to meet their demands or they will kill the hostages, according to a video broadcast on Al-Jazeera television.
TERRORISTS
But "we will not negotiate with any terrorists that take hostage of any individual, and we will seek to capture or kill them," senior coalition spokesman Dan Senor was quoted as saying during a news conference in Baghdad. He said the coalition was trying to confirm the reported abduction of three Japanese, a Canadian, an Arab Israeli and a Briton. "But regardless of whether or not the reports are accurate, our message to anybody who would take hostage of any foreign citizen or Iraqi is the same," AFP quoted him as saying. "It obviously will not be tolerated."
However the ongoing violence seemed to make it difficult to rescue the hostages. By late Friday at least 42 U.S. soldiers were known to have died as well as more than 460 Iraqis, including many civilians, in and around Fallujah, in one of the worst clashes since American president, George W. Bush announced
"an end to major operations" on May 1 last year. Faced with growing anger of the mounting civilian death toll, Ambassador Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, said Marines had re-installed a ceasefire in the area after six days, to allow the interim Iraqi government to deliver supplies to the town and to let Fallujah residents "tend to wounded and dead."
Despite the officially declared ceasefire, reporters in the area said fighting continued in Fallujah, with explosions echoing through the city after nightfall. Residents turned a soccer stadium into a makeshift burial ground for hundreds of Iraqi dead, news reports said. Women, children and the elderly were allowed to leave Fallujah, but men of "military age" were ordered to stay in the city by Marines, The Associated Press (AP) news agency reported.
U.S. DELEGATION
Speaking in Budapest, Hungary, representatives of a U.S congressional delegation tried to calm fears among allies that the violence become uncontrollable amid growing terrorism fears. "There isn’t the slightest doubt in our minds that the forces of freedom and civilization will prevail in Iraq. The enormous fire power that the United States and coalition forces have could finish this uprising within hours," said Congressman Tom Lantos in response to a question from our reporter. "We are not doing that because we are concerned about the loss of human lives," he added.
Hungary, which has hundreds of troops in Iraq, wants to see 100,000 additional forces in the country to crush the current uprising. The Chairman of the influential House International Relations Committee Henry J. Hyde said this was up to "commanders on the ground" to decide "how many troops they need and where they need them."
There were also fears that American forces were losing control over several other cities as anti-U.S. Muslim militants still held partial or full control over the southern cities of Najaf and Kufa. AP quoted unidentified officials as saying that it appeared there were links "at the lowest levels” between Shiite militia and Sunni Arab insurgents.
Yet, U.S. troops recaptured the Shiite Muslim town of Kut, in the coalition’s Polish-commanded sector, overnight, said Spanish Captain Vicente Bizarrozo, a spokesman for the multinational division in south-central Iraq, by telephone from Iraq, news reports said. Ukrainian troops pulled out of Kut on Wednesday saying a lack of adequate equipment made it impossible for them to launch a counter offensive.
CLASHES
The clashes a year to the day after U.S. troops toppled the statue of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in the capital Baghdad has underscored concern among Iraqis that the country is plunging into civil war amid reports that police men trained by American forces abandoned their posts to join the resistance against what they see as the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq.
Among the latest violence directed against Americans and their allies, was an attack on a U.S. convoy carrying fuel on a road to Fallujah, Friday April 9, several news organizations said. A Reuters news agency photographer was quoted as saying that he had seen "nine bodies burning inside vehicles in the convoy."
The fighting started after four U.S. citizens working for a security firm were killed in Fallujah last week and the bodies of two of them were mutilated and put on display. Iraq’s minority Christians was preparing for a difficult Easter as there has been concern that the Muslim violence will also be directed to them, as they have often been seen by Muslim militants as supporting the U.S. led operations.
Scores of Christians are believed to have been killed or injured throughout Iraq since last year in Muslim violence. In addition several Christian missionaries and aid workers have died in different circumstances.
CHRISTIAN CASUALTIES
Among the latest Christian casualties was Emad Mikha, 44, who died last Sunday in the Iraqi town of Muqdadiyah, about 70 miles (112 kilometers) northeast of Baghdad, The Associated Press reported. He left his family and job as a supermarket butcher in America last year to work with U.S. troops in his native country. Before going, he told his co-workers he would be stationed in the desert away from the fighting, and be brought in to assist in prisoner interrogations.
Neither the Defense Department nor the contractor who employed him, Titan National Security Solutions in San Diego, have so far discussed his death, AP reported. "He knew God," his wife Rita Mikha said about her husband. "That’s why he went back to Iraq, to help the people in the two countries he loved. He wanted them to understand each other."
The Mikhas, who married in Baghdad in 1988 are Chaldeans, Iraqi Christians who trace their history back to early civilizations of Mesopotamia. They started a new life together in America. Rita Mikha marveled at how her husband became a best friend to their three children and how he obsessed over building a better life, AP noticed.
On Sunday – their 16th wedding anniversary, that life together ended, when Rita Mikha received word of her husband’s death in Iraq, where he was working with the U.S. Army as a civilian translator. She has yet to learn how he died. "He was everything to me," Mikha told AP. "He changed my life. He’s like my brother, my husband, my friend, my teacher."
