"Terrorists" trying to force Japanese troops from Iraq may have been behind a series of blasts heard outside a Japanese camp, government officials said Thursday, vowing not to back out of reconstruction attempts.
Earlier in the day Japan sais it was investigating three blasts, reportedly set off by a mortar or rocket, heard overnight near the troops' base camp in Samawah.
"Terrorists just want to create confusion. They are trying to make the Self-Defense Forces withdraw," Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi told reporters, according to The AP. "I think this was part of such scare tactics."
Meanwhile, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the US military's deputy director of operations in Iraq, told CNN television from Baghdad that more Iraqi mosques could be targeted if they are used as bases for attacks or for weapons storage.
He said about "15 or so targets" had been detained in connection with the contractors' killings as hundreds of Marines swarmed into Fallujah. On Wednesday, US helicopters bombed a mosque in Fallujah believed to be sheltering Iraqi fighters.
Despite earlier indicating that up to 40 fighters were killed in the air strike on the mosque, a marine officer later admitted that American troops had failed to find any bodies inside.
"When we hit that building I thought we had killed all the bad guys, but when we went in they didn't find any bad guys in the building," Lieutenant Colonel Brennan Byrne told AFP.
© 2004 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
