DONKEY CARTS?:

Rockets fired at oil ministry, two hotels in Baghdad (AP, 11/21/03)

More than a dozen rockets fired from donkey carts slammed into Iraq's Oil Ministry and two downtown hotels Friday morning — brazen, coordinated strikes at some of Baghdad's most heavily protected civilian sites that defied a U.S. crackdown.

Two more rocket launchers mounted on donkey carts were found within hours, one of them 30 yards from the Italian Embassy, the other near the Academy of Fine Arts, both in the Waziriya neighborhood north of downtown. Neither appeared to have been fired.

Rockets Hit Two Hotels and Ministry in Baghdad (JOHN F. BURNS, 11/21/03, NY Times)

Guests in the room close to where the rockets struck - including this reporter, whose room was 50 feet away from one of the strikes - heard what appeared at first to be a single explosion, suggesting that the weapon used against the hotel might have been a multiple rocket launcher of the type used on Oct. 26 against the Rashid Hotel, base for many senior American military and intelligence officials. One person was killed in that attack.

The attack on Friday was potentially the most serious strike on a major target involving foreigners in Baghdad since the Oct. 27 suicide bombing of the International Committee of the Red Cross, one of a series of suicide bombings that day across the city that killed more than 25 people.

The pattern of several of the most serious attacks in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq in recent months has appeared to have been aimed at driving as many Westerners out of the country as possible, isolating the American and British troops who carried the brunt of fighting in the war to topple Saddam Hussein, and making impossible the implementation of plans to spend billions of dollars on reconstruction here.

A voice purporting to be that of Mr. Hussein said in an audiotape released Sunday that those mounting the attacks on the Americans should also concentrate on "foreign agents" who were assisting in the occupation of Iraq, and that the defeat of "the evil ones" meaning the Americans was inevitable.

Gotta wonder why you'd stay in such an obvious target?

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 21, 2003 10:08 AM