Insurgent Attacks Repelled
Marines Said to Mistakenly Kill Iraqi Journalist in Ramadi
By Jonathan Finer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, January 26, 2006; A18


BAGHDAD, Jan. 25 -- U.S. Marines and Iraqi soldiers repelled coordinated attacks on the provincial government headquarters in the western city of Ramadi on Tuesday afternoon, killing seven insurgents, the military said Wednesday.

Five insurgents -- whose assault included mortar, small-arms and machine-gun fire -- were killed by a strike from a Marine Harrier jet as they gathered in a nearby cemetery, according to a statement from Capt. Jeffrey S. Pool, a Marine spokesman in the city. Two other fighters died in a firefight after insurgents used a rocket-propelled grenade to attack a military convoy entering the city's main government compound.

No U.S. or Iraqi forces were wounded in the clashes, the statement said.

The military also announced that a Marine was killed Tuesday by small-arms fire in Karmah, west of Baghdad, and that one soldier died Wednesday in a roadside bombing south of the capital.

During the fighting in Ramadi, Zaal Shehan Mahmoud, 30, a cameraman for the Baghdad TV network, was killed by more than 20 bullets to the head, abdomen and legs, according to Mohammed Dulaimi, a doctor at the Ramadi hospital.

Baghdad TV is owned by the country's dominant Sunni Arab political organization, the Iraqi Islamic Party, which recently re-entered politics after boycotting elections held a year ago. A party official, Baha Aldin Naqshabandi, said Marines mistook Mahmoud for a fighter while he was gathering footage in the city's main market. He had been sent to Ramadi to report on the condition of residents after the recent outbreak of violence.

Ramadi, capital of the insurgent stronghold of Anbar province, has in recent months experienced some of the heaviest exchanges between U.S. and Iraqi forces and Sunni-led insurgents, who in early January killed dozens of police recruits in a suicide bombing.

Tension also mounted Wednesday in the predominantly Shiite southern city of Basra. Several hundred protesters took to the streets to denounce raids conducted Tuesday by British forces in which at least a dozen people were detained, most of them members of the city's police force.

Provincial Gov. Muhammed Waili joined the protesters, many of whom were of the same tribes as the detainees. They chanted slogans calling for independence from the foreign forces that police their region.

The police forces in Basra and across southern Iraq have increasingly come under the control of sectarian militias blamed for widespread kidnappings, assassinations and other acts of political violence. In September, British troops plowed armored vehicles through the wall of a police station in an attempt to free two service members believed to be detained there. The men were later found in a house nearby controlled by militiamen.

In Samarra, north of Baghdad, where more than 40 police recruits were killed by gunmen this week, Sunni Arab cleric Abdul Karim Jasim Muhammed was shot dead by police at a checkpoint on the road to the Iraqi capital on Wednesday.

Muhammed's mother, who was traveling with him in the vehicle, said police "shot randomly to frighten the people and force them to go back. I was about to tell my son to go back, but it was too late. One of the bullets reached his head and killed him immediately."

Meanwhile, a U.S. government audit of its spending in Iraq published Tuesday revealed irregularities and improprieties, including tens of millions of dollars in cash deposited and withdrawn from a vault without any tracking documentation and up to $60,000 in reconstruction funds gambled away by an American soldier traveling in the Philippines.

U.S. officials "did not effectively manage" more than 2,000 contracts worth $88 million, according to the report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, which covered spending during 2003 and 2004 in six southern and central provinces.

In the southern city of Hilla, the document said, the United States paid $108,140 for renovations that were never made to an Olympic-size swimming pool and signed off on repairs to an elevator in the city's general hospital that later crashed to the ground, killing three people.

Special correspondents Salih Saif Aldin and Bassam Sebti contributed to this report.

Ellie