- BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.N.
Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he may decide as early as Monday on sending
a mission to help a U.S. handover of power to Iraqis, while U.S. forces
searched for three missing military personnel.
-
- The U.S. military said a Kiowa helicopter crashed on
Sunday during a search for a soldier who was on a patrol boat on the Tigris
river near the northern city of Mosul that went missing earlier. It was
not known if the helicopter came under fire.
-
- A search went on for the helicopter's two pilots and
the soldier. No details of what happened to the boat were available, but
the military said two Iraqi police and a translator were believed to have
died in the incident.
-
- Rescuers were fired at with small arms after the helicopter
crash and a Reuters cameraman at the scene said an Iraqi policeman was
killed in a drive-by shooting.
-
- Japan's Defense Ministry said a Jordanian driver was
killed on Sunday when a truck with a mobile home for Japanese troops was
attacked about 100 km (60 miles) northwest of Baghdad.
-
- "I would expect to make a decision in the next day
or so," Annan told Swedish TV on Sunday as Washington said it saw
a significant role for the U.N. in the handover of power to Iraqis in June,
particularly in assessing the feasibility of elections.
-
- Annan has sent two security experts to Baghdad to decide
whether it was safe for U.N. international staff to return to Iraq. Guerrilla
bomb attacks at the weekend killed six U.S. soldiers and four Iraqis.
-
- ELECTION DEMANDS
-
- Washington, which previously ruled out any major U.N.
political involvement in Iraq, has said the United Nations could help supervise
the handover and discuss demands by the majority Shi'ite Muslims and other
Iraqis for early elections.
-
- Top Shi'ite cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani wants a full-scale
election, which would probably favor Shi'ites who make up an estimated
60 percent of the 25 million population from a volatile mix of ethnic and
religious groups.
-
- The Shi'ites have been flexing their muscles after three
decades of repression under Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim.
-
- A U.S. plan envisages regional caucuses selecting an
assembly to choose a transitional government for sovereignty in June. Washington
believes elections would be difficult to organize due to a lack of electoral
registers and laws.
-
- "We have asked the United Nations...for a second
opinion on this issue of is it possible to get world standard elections
within four, five or six months before June," said U.S. Assistant
Secretary of State for Democracy Lorne Carner.
-
- Diplomats at the United Nations said Annan may not give
details on the timing of the U.N. mission to Baghdad or who would lead
it, but it was expected to go next month.
-
- They said Annan would probably link the departure to
a U.N. security assessment, required since a bomb attack on U.N. headquarters
in Baghdad last August killed 22 people and prompted the world body to
withdraw all international staff.
-
- Annan was asked to send the mission by Iraq's U.S. Governor
Paul Bremer and the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council.
-
- CALL FOR INQUIRY ON BUSH
-
- U.S. Senator John Kerry, a Democratic hopeful in the
race to challenge President Bush in presidential elections in November,
demanded an independent commission investigate the Bush administration's
grounds for going to war in Iraq.
-
- David Kay, who quit last week as chief U.S. arms hunter,
has said he did not believe Saddam had any stockpiles of biological and
chemical weapons as U.S intelligence said before the war.
-
- "I actually think the intelligence community owes
the president, rather than the president owing the American people. It
is not a political gotcha issue," said Kay.
-
- Bush ordered U.S.-led forces to invade Iraq last March
to topple Saddam after accusing him of possessing chemical and biological
arms and developing a nuclear weapon.
-
- Washington says Saddam supporters and foreign Islamic
militants are behind guerrilla attacks on U.S.-led forces, but that the
number of raids has declined in the wake of the former Iraqi president's
capture in December.
-
- Since the U.S.-led invasion in March, at least 513 American
soldiers have died in Iraq, 355 in combat.
-
- Japan was set to order the dispatch of its main army
contingent to Iraq after the junior party in the ruling coalition approved
the mission on Monday. It plans a deployment of some 1,000 military personnel.
-
- "The security situation is relatively stable,"
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi told parliament. The Japanese public remains
divided about the mission and critics say it violates Japan's pacifist
constitution.
|
