The blast hit the car with a stunning thud Half an hour earlier, we had been sitting with a former colonel from Saddam Hussein's army, a man who - at the very least - sympathises with the guerrillas fighting the the US, but speaks like one who has ties with the Americans too. He was the 400th US soldier to die since the invasion and occupation; 12 more Americans died later when two Black Hawk helicopters collided and crashed into a residential area of Mosul, possibly causing further casualties on the ground.We had been warned. As in all wars, there are people who insist on anonymity when they pitch their views to the media. So we shall call him Mustafa.Meeting us in Fallujah - the Sunni trucking town west of Baghdad that has become an epicentre of Iraqi attacks on US forces for the past six months - Mustafa had been in jovial mood. Such attacks are a daily event: not far away another American convoy was not so fortunate yesterday. A roadside bomb exploded next to a patrol in Baghdad's northern Azamiyah neighbourhood, killing a soldier and injuring two others. And so were we.Coming under attack in the early afternoon of a clear day while travelling a motorway that runs across the landscape from Fallujah to Baghdad is like being shelled while driving down the M4 from London to Bristol. Although dotted with the occasional factory plant and depot, the place is flat and open. It is not the sort of territory one immediately associates with the setting for a chronic guerrilla war.Yet that is what it has become. We were seconds from disaster.A few heart thumps later, the target of the remotely detonated roadside mine sped past - a Humvee from the US military police, escorting a convoy of lorries travelling into Baghdad from Kuwait This time the Americans were lucky So were the other Iraqi motorists around them.
My driver, Mohammed, let out a shout of surprise and slammed on the brakes. All around us vehicles skidded to a halt as a turret of dust and smoke uncoiled high into the air and across the highway. We were only 35 yards away when the bomb exploded, spraying out from the central reservation into the fast lane. The blast hit the car with a stunning thud. But it is an assessment with which senior officers in the Israeli army are believed to agree.For the time being, the UN's World Food Organisation has stepped into the breach, setting up an alternative food programme until next summer.. |
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