Baghdad, gunshots against council member

BAGDAD – The violence in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq does not stop. This morning Akira al Hachimi, a member of the Iraqi interim governing council was wounded in Baghdad in an ambush. A Shiite religion expert, Akira al Hachimi is one of the three women who sits on the provisional governing council, the body installed on July 13 and which brings together 25 representatives of the various ethnic communities living in the country, including Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Christians and Turkmen.

The ambush, according to a local source, took place around 8:45 am local time outside her home in a western area of ​​Baghdad. The woman injured in the shoulder, leg and stomach was admitted to the Yarmouk hospital in conditions defined as “serious”. Her driver was also injured in the back. The perpetrators of the gesture are still unknown, although some suspects have been stopped for questioning.

Akira al Hachimi had been responsible for the international relations of the Foreign Ministry during the regime of Saddam Hussein and for this title she was a collaborator of the deputy premier Tareq Aziz. A French literature graduate, she was part of the committee that headed the Foreign Ministry immediately after the fall of Saddam. She participated in the delegation that went to the UN in July and should have been part of the one that will travel to New York this week to attend the UN debates on Iraq.

The tension remains very high throughout the country. This morning in Fallujah, one of the most turbulent and unstable places in all of Iraq, where the presence of militiamen remained faithful to the old regime of Saddam Hussein, a violent explosion was heard, immediately followed by exchanges gunshots. According to some witnesses, the chaos erupted shortly after the city, located sixty kilometers west of Baghdad, had been isolated from the outside world by several hundred US soldiers broken down into two convoys, which had blocked all of them for about an hour incoming and outgoing accesses. Later the motorized columns of the American military were divided and reached two distinct US bases, located respectively at the extreme southern and western periphery. It is at this point that the violent explosion occurred first, then the shootings.

September 20 2003