One Polish Soldier Killed, Four US Troops Wounded

Guerrillas in the town of Iskandariya, 45 km south of Baghdad, attacked US troops with a home made bomb on Sunday at 11 am, wounding two. (Note that this attack occurred, not in the usual northern Sunni Arab areas, but in a Shiite region on the road to Karbala.) Guerrillas at Taji just north of Baghdad, blew up a similar explosive device at 9:45 am on Sunday, wounding two soldiers who were taken to a combat support hospital. A bomb went off near Falluja as a US military convoy passed, but no word yet of any casualities. In al-Hilla in the south, armed Iraqis refused to be searched by Polish soldiers, who shot and killed one of them when he fired on them. One Polish soldier was reported killed according to al-Zaman. (- AFP). While the discovery by US troops of two big weapons caches over the weekend is in a way good news, it is also very worrying that there were still large weapons depots of this sort still not under US control 5 months after the fall of the regime! SAM-7 surface to air missiles were among the munitions discovered, which can be used against civilian aircraft (as was done by al-Qaeda in Mombasa last year).

In the wake of Saturday's rocket attacks on Baghdad's Rashid Hotel (long a place that Westerners congregated), the evacuation of remaining UN personnel appears to have been accelerated. Many aid agencies have now pulled out of Iraq, at a time when malnourishment is widespread and sources of income have dried up.