Iraqi resistance fighters fired rocket propelled grenades at U.S. Army patrols in two western Iraqi towns, the US military said Monday. No one was injured in the grenade attacks in Khaldiyah and Habaniyah, according to the overnight intelligence report distributed to Army commanders.
On Sunday, Iraq made its first foray back into the international oil market since the war, with the loading of one million barrels of crude onto a Turkish tanker at the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, AP reported.
But sabotage and looting of the pipeline from the northern Iraqi town of Kirkuk to Ceyhan delayed the flow of freshly pumped oil. Pumping was supposed to have begun Sunday.
Information Radio, operated by the U.S.-occupation forces, broadcast an appeal Monday for Iraqis to help police the pipeline and report the location of looted equipment. It said Iraq was losing $50 million a week needed for the nation's reconstruction due to delays caused by sabotage and theft.
In Ramadi, a patrol of two tanks and four Humvees came under small arms fire on Sunday, and the patrol saw a young girl running away with an AK-47 assault rifle, said Capt. Burris Wollsieffer, of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. The bullets landed harmlessly in the dirt around the vehicles, he said on Monday.
Two senior army officers met Monday with a prominent Islamic cleric, Abdullah al-Annay who preaches in two Ramadi mosques, to ask him to scale down his anti-American sermons, said the captain.
"If he keeps this kind of speech going, they are just going to attack us more and more," said Wollsieffer, whose regiment has lost 10 men.
Meanwhile, in an interview published Monday in The Washington Post, Grand Ayatollah Ali Hussein al-Sistani, a senior figure in Iraq's Shiite clerical hierarchy, demanded that the U.S. occupation forces allow Iraqis to rule themselves.
"We feel great unease over their goals, and we see that it is necessary that they should make room for Iraqis to rule themselves by themselves without foreign intervention," al-Sistani said in written responses to questions from The Washington Post. (Albawaba.com)
© 2003 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
