Baghdad asks UN to halt invasion: Invaders warned of surprise response
BAGHDAD, March 22: Iraq has asked the United Nations to condemn and halt the US and British invasion and ask them to withdraw their forces outside its borders.
In a statement sent to the UN Security Council and read on Iraqi television on Saturday, Foreign Minister Naji Sabri described the invasion as a threat to international and regional peace.
“Since the Anglo-American colonial military aggression against Iraq is a threat to international and regional peace and security, we call on the United Nations to condemn this invasion and aggression, move to stop it immediately and unconditionally, and ask US and British aggressors to withdraw their forces immediately outside the borders of the Republic of Iraq.”
The statement added: “Security Council resolutions must be respected and implemented, starting with the lifting of the unjust sanctions against Iraq, disarming the Zionist entity (Israel) of weapons of mass destruction to create a region without weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East.”
Mr Sabri said the war on Iraq, which Washington says is to oust President Saddam Hussein and rid the country of weapons of mass destruction, was part of “criminal practices aimed at imposing US hegemony on the world”.
WARNING: Iraqi Vice-President Taha Yassine Ramadan has warned the United States that it faces the highest casualties in their history in its war to unseat President Saddam, AFP adds from Hamburg.
If the United States “want to fight to the last man, they will suffer the biggest losses of human life in their history and they will never win,” Mr Ramadan said in an interview with German weekly magazine Der Spiegel to be published on Monday.
“We will never give up. Not in the villages, not in the towns,” he was quoted as saying.
“The Americans and British will be surprised to discover what the Iraqis are capable of. We have not as yet given the slightest sample of what we have prepared for them,” Mr Ramadan said.—Reuters/AFP
