IRAQ Grenade attacks target U.S. troops in two towns

Resistance groups have started giving themselves names and are stepping up attacks.
COMBINED DISPATCHES
RAMADI, Iraq -- Insurgents fired rocket-propelled grenades at U.S. Army patrols in two western Iraqi towns -- the latest in an escalating series of attacks that included an ambush involving a 12-year-old girl with an assault rifle, the military said today.
No one was injured in the grenade attacks in Khaldiyah and Habaniyah, according to the overnight intelligence report distributed to Army commanders.
Military officials said they had no information about reports that an airstrike on a three-vehicle convoy fleeing Iraq near the Syrian border last Wednesday killed top officials in the government of former president Saddam Hussein, perhaps including Saddam or his sons.
As reported in The Observer of London, defense officials said DNA tests were being conducted on the victims.
Officials said there was no evidence so far that either Saddam or either of his sons, Odai or Qusai, was hit, The Washington Post and The New York Times reported today.
Saddam and his sons are the top three on the U.S. list of most-wanted officials in Iraq.
Oil
On Sunday, Iraq made its first foray back into the international oil market since the war, with the loading of one million barrels of crude onto a Turkish tanker at the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan.
But sabotage and looting of the 600-mile pipeline from the northern Iraqi town of Kirkuk to Ceyhan delayed the flow of freshly pumped oil -- the key to reconstructing an economy devastated by sanctions and war. Pumping was supposed to have begun Sunday.
Sabotage was blamed for a massive fire in a gas pipeline about 94 miles west of Baghdad on Saturday, and the al-Jazeera satellite television station reported another pipeline explosion near the Syrian border on Sunday.
Information Radio, operated by the U.S.-led coalition, broadcast an appeal today for Iraqis to help police the pipeline and report the location of looted equipment. It said Iraq was losing $50 million a week needed for the nation's reconstruction due to delays caused by sabotage and theft.
Sunday's oil shipment marked a key first step toward economic recovery. Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world, and all proceeds from sales are to go into a U.S.-controlled fund for use in rebuilding battered infrastructure and an economy devastated by more than 12 years of U.N. economic sanctions.
Attacked
South of the capital, in a separate occurrence, attackers fired a grenade at a U.S. military vehicle Sunday, killing one American soldier and wounding another.
In Ramadi, a patrol of two tanks and four Humvees came under small- arms fire Sunday, and the patrol saw a young girl running away with an AK-47 assault rifle, said Capt. Burris Wollsieffer, of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. The bullets landed harmlessly in the dirt around the vehicles, he said today.
The troops followed the girl home and found the rifle wrapped in a red dress propped in a corner. Three men in the household were taken for interrogation, but the troops allowed the girl to remain at home when they learned her age. They also seized $1,500 in cash and $1,000 in Iraqi dinars, the officer said.
None of the troops saw who fired the weapon, although they found no other suspects in the area other than the young girl.
"It's just weird. It's totally unconventional," said Wollsieffer, when asked about the rising number of ambushes on his forces in Ramadi, a town where resistance to the occupation has been high. "It's guerrilla warfare."
Organization
Evidence that Iraq's loose and murky resistance movement may be coalescing can be seen in the far bolder anti-American propaganda campaigns that the militants have unleashed over the past week. Another hint is that some of the groups have begun giving themselves names.
A faction calling itself the Iraqi National Front of Fedayeen appeared on Lebanese television Saturday, vowing to send the dead bodies of American troops home "one after another" until they pulled out of Iraq.
"You must know that the Iraqis have become disillusioned with your great lie about the liberation of Iraq," said a fighter, his face obscured by a checkered headscarf. Three comrades sitting near him toted rocket-propelled grenades.
Last week, another group calling itself the Iraqi Resistance Brigades alleged on Qatar's Al Jazeera channel that they were responsible for the growing string of anti-U.S. ambushes in Iraq.
Senior U.S. officers dismiss the threat of Iraq's armed resistance as negligible. Intelligence officials said that much of the violence is the work of cells made up of fewer than 10 hard-core members of Saddam's old Baath Party. Still, the U.S. troops on the receiving end of the hit-and-run attacks aren't so dismissive of the danger.
"These people know what they are doing, and they are getting better at it," said 1st Sgt. Joseph Waldren, a soldier with the 4th Infantry Division in Baiji, a town in Saddam's tribal heartland.
Anti-American sermons
Two senior Army officers met today with a prominent Islamic cleric, Abdullah al-Annay who preaches in two Ramadi mosques, to ask him to tone down his anti-American sermons, said the captain.
"If he keeps this kind of speech going, they are just going to attack us more and more," said Wollsieffer, whose regiment has lost 10 men -- more than half the 18 men reported killed in combat -- since May 1 when major fighting was declared over.
The 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment held a moving memorial service Sunday for Staff Sgt. William T. Latham, who died four days earlier in a Washington hospital from shrapnel wounds suffered during a May 19 raid at a suspected arms market.
In an interview published today in The Washington Post, Grand Ayatollah Ali Hussein al-Sistani, a senior figure in Iraq's Shiite clerical hierarchy, demanded that the U.S. occupation forces allow Iraqis to rule themselves.
"We feel great unease over their goals, and we see that it is necessary that they should make room for Iraqis to rule themselves by themselves without foreign intervention," al-Sistani said in written responses to questions from The Washington Post.
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