US Soldier Killed as Bush Vows to Find Saddam's Weapons

05/06/2003| IslamWeb

US President George W. Bush vowed to find Saddam Hussein's alleged arms of mass destruction, as a at least one US soldier was killed in an Iraqi hotspot town Al-Fallujah, a day after reinforcements were ordered to the area. Extra troops were being sent to bolster the US-led coalition after a string of deadly attacks, while more experts arrived in Iraq to hunt for the banned weaponry whose absence is proving an embarrassment for London and Washington. At the Qatari base from where the coalition ran the war on Iraq, Bush confidently vowed to find the weapons arsenal which the coalition partners used as justification for the conflict. "Here's a man who spent decades hiding tools of mass murder," the president told some 2,500 cheering US air force, navy and army troops, referring to Saddam. "He's got a big country in which to hide 'em. Well, we'll look. We'll reveal the truth," said Bush, fresh from two days of Middle East summits to launch an Israeli-Palestinian peace drive. "No terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime because the Iraqi regime is no more," said Bush. "We made sure that Iraq's not gonna serve as an arsenal for terrorist groups." The US commander in chief said there were "still pockets of criminality" in Iraq but the occupying forces were "taking aggressive steps to increase order throughout the country. "Day by day the United States and our coalition partners are making the streets **safer*** for Iraqi citizens." But in the western town of Fallujah, a US soldier was killed and five wounded in a rocket-propelled grenade attack on Thursday, the US military's Central Command (Centcom) said. The ground forces commander in Iraq, Lieutenant General David McKiernan, announced Wednesday he was deploying troop reinforcements to the Sunni Muslim tribal belt west of Baghdad to tackle the flurry of anti-US attacks. The unrest was mainly the work of former elements of the ousted regime, he said, while acknowledging that other groups might be involved, including Saudi-influenced Islamic fundamentalists. On May 27, two soldiers were killed and nine wounded in Fallujah, a deeply conservative town where tension has been on the boil since US troops shot dead at least 16 protesters in April. In all, 25 US soldiers have died in fighting or accidents in Iraq since May 1, when Bush declared the war effectively over. The head of Iraq's Al-Quds (Jerusalem) Army, set up by Saddam with the declared aim of liberating Palestinian territories from Israel, is in the custody of coalition forces, Centcom said. "Ayad Futayyih Khalifa al-Rawi, number 30 on the US Central Command 'Iraqi Top 55' list (of most wanted Iraqis) is in custody," said a Centcom statement. He was chief of staff of the Al-Quds Army which the old regime's propaganda machine claimed had seven million trained volunteers. More than half the Iraqis listed as most wanted have been captured or surrendered to the coalition since the regime's fall on April 9, although the fate of Saddam and two sons Uday and Qussay remains a mystery. In the latest episode of a hot debate in Britain over whether the threat posed by Saddam was deliberately exaggerated to justify war, Prime Minister Tony Blair went on the offensive against critics of his Iraq policy. "It is completely and totally untrue" that the dossier's most startling claim -- that Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons in as little as 45 minutes -- was shoved in at the behest of aides despite the reservations of intelligence officials, he told the House of Commons on Wednesday. "There was no attempt at any time ... to override the intelligence judgements of the joint intelligence committee," he said. "The truth is some people resent the fact it was right to go to conflict and we won the conflict ... Iraq is now free and we should be proud of that," said the prime minister. The British parliament voted to reject an investigation of the charges that the government doctored intelligence reports, after MPs cross-examined Blair. Meanwhile, the first members of a new team of 1,300 to 1,400 Australian, British and US experts have arrived in Baghdad to begin a new search for evidence of banned weapons. The team will remain in Iraq as long as it takes to uncover Saddam's secret weapons programmes, McKiernan said, which could take some time. But he added, "I know we got the number one weapon of mass destruction in Iraq -- that was Saddam Hussein." Saddam disappeared as Baghdad fell into coalition hands on April 9 and his fate is unknown. **PHOTO CAPTION*** An Iraqi boy sits next to a U.S. soldier during a house-to-house search for guns in a neighborhood of Baghdad, Wednesday, June 4, 2003.(AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano)