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BAGHDAD, June 29: Three US soldiers and six Iraqis were killed on Tuesday in violence on the first day of business for Iraq's new government after it formally regained sovereignty from the US-led coalition.
As Ankara hailed the release of three Turks kidnapped in Iraq and threatened with decapitation, US President George Bush said Nato's agreement to train the new Iraqi army was "a crucial success for the Iraqi people".
The three Turks kidnapped weeks ago were released, said a Turkish official and a statement from their kidnappers carried by Al-Jazeera television, hours before an ultimatum to kill them was due to expire.
The hostages were held by the Tawhid wal Jihad group, led by the Jordanian Abu Mussab Al Zarqawi, said to be linked to the Al Qaeda network. "In view of your honourable attitude... we are freeing these hostages and releasing them after they pledged to no longer help the infidels," a spokesman for the group said in a video tape aired by Al-Jazeera.
The group had said in a tape broadcast on Saturday that the three would be beheaded within 72 hours unless Turkish firms stopped working for the Americans in Iraq. The Turkish government rejected the ultimatum.
Iraq awoke as a sovereign nation on Tuesday for the first time since last year's US-led invasion with the legal end of the occupation despite a heavy foreign troop presence, as at least nine people were killed in a wave of attacks.
Three US marines were killed and two wounded when their convoy was hit in a bomb attack in Baghdad, the US military said in a statement. The deaths raised to 632 the number of American occupation troops killed in action since the invasion.
Two Iraqi resistance fighters were killed in a gunbattle on a Baghdad police station. And in the town of Mahmudiyah, south of the capital, one policeman was killed and another injured in an attack on a police headquarters.
A district police chief in Kirkuk escaped an assassination attempt, but his driver was killed, said the city's police chief, while in Mosul, two Kurdish peshmerga fighters were killed in the third attack of its kind since Saturday. In Istanbul, Mr Bush hailed Nato's agreement to train Iraqi security forces as a vital achievement for the Iraqi people, in a speech to university students.
TONY BLAIR: British Prime Minister Tony Blair said multinational troops could only stay in Iraq as long as they were wanted. "If you don't wish us to stay, we have no right to be there," he told the Pentagon-funded Iraqiya TV in Istanbul, where he was attending a Nato summit.
For his part, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw admitted on BBC radio that some mistakes were made in Iraq in the transition of power. "In this transition some mistakes have been made," Mr Straw said in an interview.
"I accept, with the benefit of hindsight, there were decisions made ... which might have been done differently," Mr Straw said. The transfer of sovereignty has been cautiously welcomed around the world, although many opponents of the US-led war have reserved judgment about the heavy foreign troop presence that remains in the country.
DIPLOMATIC TIES: Kuwait swiftly also announced the resumption of diplomatic relations with Baghdad, severed since Iraq's forces invaded the emirate in 1990, while France said that it was prepared to reopen official diplomatic ties.
But Thailand said it would withdraw its troops ahead of their scheduled departure from Iraq in September if the unrest worsens. Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said: "If there is no security or no one needs our help we can withdraw immediately."
Thailand posted a 450-strong contingent including engineers and medics to Iraq last September after remaining neutral during the spring 2003 invasion. On the cultural front, Unesco warned that heritage sites in Iraq continued to be looted and called for better security so that they could send teams back to properly assess the damage. -AFP
