Red Cross Weighs Withdrawal After Baghdad Attack
Mon Oct 27, 9:34 AM ET Add World - Reuters to My Yahoo!
By Richard Waddington
GENEVA (Reuters) - The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)
expressed outrage at Monday's unprecedented suicide bombing of its Baghdad
headquarters, which killed at least 10 people, and said it was weighing a
withdrawal from Iraq (news - web sites).
Reuters Photo
It was the first time the Swiss-based relief agency, which for 140 years has
sought to protect the victims of war, had been targeted by suicide bombers,
although a number of officials have died in shootings and other attacks in
places such as Chechnya (news - web sites) and Afghanistan (news - web sites)
in recent years.
"We are deeply shocked...because it is an attack against the ICRC ... and that
means, of course, a deliberate attack against our protective emblem and against
our work," chief spokeswoman Antonella Notari told Reuters Television.
The organization issued a statement condemning the bombing, in which two of its
Iraqi guards were among the dead, and stressed that all deliberate attacks on
civilians were violations of "international humanitarian law and negate the
most basic principles of humanity."
Most of the victims were passers-by.
Eye witnesses said an ambulance packed with explosives and bearing the ICRC's
distinctive red cross emblem was used in Monday's attack, which blew out the
front of the building.
It was one of four rush hour bombings around Baghdad, including two strikes
against police stations. In all, at least 33 people died and many more were
injured in the capital's bloodiest day for two months.
EXTREMELY DIFFICULT
Notari said that it was too early to say whether the ICRC would have to pull
out of Iraq, where it has been present since 1980. In that time, the country
fought an eight-year war with Iran and was attacked twice by U.S.-led military
coalitions.
"We will have to analyze exactly what this means," Notari said. "We know there
is a need for the ICRC...(But) this makes things extremely difficult. Today, it
is impossible for us to give a precise decision on that," she said.
The agency had already cut the number of international staffers in Iraq to 30,
from a peak of some 100 in the aftermath of the overthrow of former president
Saddam Hussein (news - web sites). It also has several hundred local staff.
The retreat gathered pace after an ICRC technician from Sri Lanka was shot dead
in July in what the organization said was also a deliberate attack because the
vehicle he was traveling in was clearly marked.
In August, the United Nations (news - web sites) Baghdad headquarters was also
hit by a car bomb, which killed 22 people including the world body's top
representative in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello.
After that incident, the U.N. pulled out most of its staff, and most remaining
non-government aid bodies followed suit.
The ICRC prides itself on being the first in and last out of conflict zones but
if it decides to pull back from Iraq, it will not be the first time.
It left Kosovo, in the former Yugoslavia, during the fighting of the late 1990s
and it also suspended operations in the Russian rebel region of Chechnya in
1996 after six doctors and nurses were shot dead while they slept in a
hospital.
Created in 1863 on the initiative of Swiss businessman Henri Dunant, who had
witnessed the carnage of the battle of Solferino four years earlier in the war
for Italian unification, the ICRC has grown to have some 1,200 international
staffers spread across dozens of countries.
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