Posted on 11/27/2003 3:31:59 PM PST by Sunshine55
Italian mission in Iraq damaged
Nov. 27 — Italy has arrested four immigrants on suspicion of recruiting Islamic militants to carry out suicide attacks in Iraq, judicial sources said Thursday, a day after the Italian mission in Baghdad was damaged by a rocket-propelled grenade.
THE FOUR north Africans were all arrested in the financial capital, Milan, and are expected to be charged with “subversive association aimed at international terrorism.” Italian authorities have issued five arrest warrants, the sources said, and police are still searching for the missing person.
One of the warrants was for a man identified as Abderrazak M. — an Algerian in his 30s arrested by German police this summer in connection with bomb attacks in Spain — but sources could not say whether he was one of the four who were taken into custody Thursday.
It is not the first time that Italy has swooped on people believed to be recruiting for suicide attacks.
In April, Italian authorities said dozens of Islamic extremists were being approached in Italy and Germany and sent to training camps in Syria before going to northern Iraq to join a group with links to al-Qaida. They made seven arrests.
The sources said that this time, investigators had also identified a training camp in Turkey that was receiving recruits from Italy, but they stressed that they had not found anything linking the suspects to the recent bombings in Istanbul.
GRENADE ATTACK ON MISSION
The arrests were made known as Italian forces reviewed damage to the country’s mission in Baghdad, where the overnight attack on the Italian mission underscored the precarious security situation in the Iraqi capital, despite a reduction in attacks on U.S.-led coalition forces in recent days. Two weeks ago, a suicide bomber detonated a truck bomb outside the Italian barracks in Nasiriyah, killing 19 Italians and 14 others in an apparent attempt to weaken the resolve of Washington’s coalition partners.
A U.S. military convoy also came under attack Thursday on the main highway west of Baghdad near the town of Abu Ghraib, witnesses said. An Associated Press Television News cameraman filmed two flatbed military trucks that were abandoned and left with their cabs blazing fiercely, as dozens of townspeople converged to loot tires and other vehicle parts. The military had no immediate information.
MORE U.S. TROOPS ON THE WAY
With violence showing no signs of abating, U.S. defense officials told Reuters that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had directed the Marine Corps to send nearly 3,000 more Marines to Iraq next year, bolstering the next wave of U.S. troops being deployed there amid the increasingly bloody guerrilla war.
The Marines will send three more battalions, along with support units, as part of the troop rotation plan for early 2004, officials said. Pentagon planners had earlier said that the United States envisioned 105,000 troops in Iraq next May — down from the current 130,000 — but the additional Marines will bring the number up to about 108,000.
A defense official said on condition of anonymity that the decision to send additional troops beyond the number announced when the Pentagon unveiled the future troop rotation plans on Nov. 6 represented a fine-tuning of the plan and was not a reaction to a changing security environment in Iraq.
“This is not ‘the sky is falling,’” the official said. “This is more planning. This is a minor tweak in the plan.”
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.com ...
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