IRAQ: The head of US Central Command, Gen John Abizaid, escaped unharmed yesterday after a rocket-propelled grenade attack on the Iraqi security facility he was visiting in Fallujah.
Shortly after a convoy carrying Gen Abizaid and his party drove into a heavily fortified Iraqi Civil Defence Corps compound, attackers fired three rocket-propelled grenades at the building. The general's convoy was also hit by small-arms fire. American solders responded with a barrage of machinegun fire, the US military said.
No soldiers and none of Gen Abizaid's party, which included the commander of western Iraq, were injured in the exchange.
Gen Abizaid, the commander of all US forces in the Middle East, was on a scheduled tour of the troubled town 30 miles to the west of Baghdad.
Soldiers gave chase to the attackers, cordoning off a local mosque without result, a military spokesman said. The general later cancelled plans for a walkabout in the city centre.
Abizaid was reported to be unfazed. Speaking in Arabic to one member of the Iraqi security force after the gunfight, the general asked about the attack and was told: "This is Fallujah. What do you expect."
Later, after he returned to the US base, Gen Abizaid said: "This is an area where there are plenty of former regime elements out there, willing to fight." Gen Abizaid then flew on to Qatar, as scheduled.
Senior officials said yesterday that the general appeared to have been deliberately targeted.
"It's no coincidence that a senior general arrives in town and we then get an ambush," a US military officer said, although a military spokesman said there were regular attacks in the town.
Fallujah has led the resistance to the US-led occupation of Iraq and is part of the area known as the Sunni triangle, Saddam Hussein's tribal heartland.
Gen Abizaid is the third high-profile American official to escape an attack in Iraq.
He took over as Central Command chief after Gen Tommy Franks retired following the defeat of Saddam Hussein.
Insurgents have apparently accelerated attacks against US forces and their Iraqi allies in an effort to wreck the handover planned for June 30th.
The attacks are blamed by Washington on the al-Qaeda terror network. Two suicide bombings of a police station and new Iraqi army recruitment centre killed over 100 people.
Yesterday a volley of eight mortar shells was fired towards a US military base in Baghdad, damaging several cars and lightly wounding three US soldiers. One soldier was killed and two wounded by a roadside bomb in western Baghdad.