IRAQ: Islamist militants vowed yesterday to assassinate Iraq's interim Prime Minister, Mr Iyad Allawi, threatening to step up a bloody campaign of beheadings and other killings a week before a US handover to Iraqi rule.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian accused by US officials of having links to al-Qaeda and who claimed responsibility for the beheading of a South Korean hostage this week, made the threat on an Islamist website.
"As for you, Allawi - sorry, the democratically elected prime minister - we have found for you a useful poison and a sure sword," said a taped voice, purported to be Zarqawi's.
Mr Allawi, a former Baathist who plotted against Saddam Hussein from exile, responded defiantly. "We do not care about these threats. We will continue to rebuild Iraq and work for freedom, democracy, justice and peace. Iraqis have faced these threats before," a spokesman for Mr Allawi said.
Washington says Saddam supporters and foreign Islamist militants are intensifying a campaign of bombings, assassinations of Iraqi officials and attacks on oil industry targets in an attempt to disrupt the June 30th handover.
Zarqawi's group, Jama'at al-Tawhid and Jihad, said on Tuesday it had decapitated South Korean civilian Kim Sun-il after Seoul refused to stop contributing troops to Iraq.
Hours after finding Kim's body, US forces launched an air strike on a suspected safe house of Zarqawi's group in Falluja, west of Baghdad, the second such raid in four days.
A senior US military official said around 20 foreign fighters were killed in the strike, while Falluja residents said the attack destroyed a garage and killed four people.
Washington, which views Zarqawi as a chief architect of violence in Iraq, has put a $10 million bounty on his head.
"The free world cannot be intimidated by the brutal action of these barbaric people," President Bush said.
A roadside bomb blast killed a woman and a small boy and wounded the woman's husband in Baghdad yesterday. The husband kept asking hospital staff to call his wife, unaware that she was dead. The couple had been married for 15 days.
The prospect of a NATO role in Iraq grew yesterday when Mr Allawi formally asked the alliance to help train his country's fledgling security forces.
Such a task would fall far short of Washington's original hope - thwarted by opposition from France and Germany - that the 26-nation alliance would take command of a multinational stabilisation force in central Iraq.
But France has said it would consider any request from Mr Allawi's interim government. Paris and Berlin have made clear, however, they would not deploy troops of their own.
A NATO official, declining to be named, said that Mr Allawi made his request in a letter to the NATO Secretary-General, Mr Jaap de Hoop Scheffer.