Shots Fired At Bulgarian President

Shots Fired at Bulgarian President Parvanov

Attacks Kill 9 in Iraq, Including 2 US Military Personnel

Guerrillas directed fire at visiting Bulgarian President Georgy Parvanov as his motorcade moved from the Polish base to the Bulgarian base near the Shiite shrine city of Karbala in south-central Iraq on Sunday. They were repelled, and no casualties are reported.

With the severe insecurity in Iraq, the parade of foreign heads of state to that country has long seemed to me unwise, since they are obvious targets and if they are moving around they cannot be made all that hard. Australia’s PM was visiting Baghdad briefly when the boat bombs struck. Parvanov should remember how exactly Bush made his one visit last Thanksgiving, with a great deal of stealth and very quickly. That wasn’t cowardice; that was realism. (Australia’s John Howard emulated Bush in making a quick trip).

At least nine persons died in violence in Iraq on Sunday. Guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb in Baghdad, killing a US soldier, and an American in the Coast Guard died of injuries suffered during Saturday’s boat bombing off Basra in the Persian Gulf. (That attack has stopped Iraq’s oil exports from the South for two days). Guerrillas fired Katyusha rockets at a hospital, a hotel and a television station in the northern city of Mosul, killing two hospital workers, two hotel workers, and wounding 13 others. Guerrillas in Kirkuk fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a police patrol (most of the police in Kirkuk are Kurdish peshmerga), killing a policeman and wounding five others.

In Diwaniya, a southern Shiite city, Spanish soldiers killed two guerrillas after taking fire from them.