PROTESTS at a lack of electricity, jobs and water in one of the most peaceful Iraqi towns degenerated into rioting yesterday when police opened fire on demonstrators who had stoned the governor’s offices in Samawah, in the southern region under British Army security.
More than 50 people were wounded, including 18 police officers, and one person was killed. Witnesses said that police opened fire on a stone- throwing crowd of 1,000 people demonstrating in the intense heat. It is the third summer that the country has suffered without regular electricity or water.
Rioters burnt police cars and members of the Mahdi Army, the illegal militia of Moqtada al-Sadr, a rebellious Shia cleric, were seen moving around the streets with rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
Council officials said that they had appealed to the nearby city of Nasariyah to send National Guard reinforcements as protesters demanded the resignation of the governor, who is a member of the ruling Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri). The police chief of the province was dismissed last week after police fired on a demonstration over the same issues a month ago.
A British Army spokesman in Basra said that he was unaware of the rioting.
Samawah is a town in which Australian troops guard about 550 Japanese soldiers overseeing the slow-moving reconstruction effort. It is normally a quiet town used as a benchmark for the Shia south, which has suffered fewer suicide bombings than the Sunni areas to the north.
Sunni districts were again hit by homicidal attacks yesterday. About thirty people were killed by insurgents, including one incident in which a tanker laden with explosives was blown up outside an army base in Tikrit, the home town of Saddam Hussein. Three soldiers were killed in an ambush in southern Baghdad and two Oil Ministry officials were murdered.
Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, said in a recent interview with Time magazine in America that the insurgency was gradually losing ground to quiet political progress.
“The insurgency has a problem, which is that as the political process matures and the Iraqis accept the political process as their future, (the insurgents) become more isolated from the population and they become nothing but a destructive force,” she said.
The New York Times has reported that General John Abizaid, the commander of US forces in the Middle East, recently outlined a plan, in a classified briefing, to reduce American forces in Iraq by 20,000- 30,000 troops by next spring, from the present 138,000.
American hopes for the Iraqi political progress hinge, however, on the final draft of a constitution acceptable to all the main ethnic and religious groups in the country being completed within eight days.
