Iraq: US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday that American forces would not defeat Iraq's rebels but would make way for Iraqis to put down an insurgency that could go on for a decade or more.
His remarks came on another day of bloodshed in which three suicide attacks around the northern city of Mosul killed over two dozen people, highlighting the task faced by Iraq's US-trained forces in overcoming a Sunni Arab revolt, backed by foreign Islamists, against the new Shia-led government.
"That insurgency can go on for any number of years," Mr Rumsfeld told Fox News. "Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years. Foreign forces are not going to repress that insurgency.
"We're going to create an environment that the Iraqi people and the Iraqi security forces can win against that insurgency."
In the space of a few hours, a suicide car bomber wrecked a police headquarters, an attack on an Iraqi army base killed at least 15 people, and four police were killed when a bomber walked into Mosul's general hospital and blew himself up.
The third attack, on a police post inside the hospital, damaged the emergency ward where casualties had been brought from the previous incidents. Six policemen and nine civilians were wounded.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the assault on the hospital, but the earlier two bombings were claimed by al-Qaeda's Iraq wing, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
In Baghdad, six policemen were killed by a suicide bomber as they were pulling into their base, police said. The deputy head of a city police department was also assassinated.
Handing over to Iraqi forces and withdrawing the US army that invaded to topple Saddam Hussein two years ago is a key policy for President George W Bush, as opinion polls show Americans turning against a project that many believed would rapidly produce a stable, pro-Washington government in Baghdad.
The deaths of six US troops in a bomb attack in Falluja on Thursday took the toll over 1,730, with another killed yesterday.