I wonder what this will do to US-Russian relations. Already Russian media is talking shit about America.Convoy of Russians Attacked in Baghdad
By MICHAEL WINES
OSCOW, April 6 — Nearly two dozen Russian diplomats and journalists, including Russia's ambassador to Iraq, came under attack twice today as they were leaving Baghdad in an automobile convoy, Russian and American officials said.
At least five were wounded, and some Russian and Arab broadcast reports tonight said that the Russian ambassador to Iraq, Vladimir Titorenko, was among them. None of the injuries were life-threatening, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman said.
Officials and witnesses disagreed as to whether the attacks came from Iraqi or American-led forces. The Russian Foreign Ministry here summoned both the American and Iraqi ambassadors to demand an inquiry and assurances that the convoy would receive safe passage.
The Russian government had advised both sides in the conflict that its diplomatic staff was leaving Baghdad. A spokesman for the American Central Command said today that officials had been aware of the Russian departure and had sought to provide "as much protection as we could."
But he stopped short of saying that American-led forces were not responsible for the attack, saying only that it remained under investigation.
The attack promised to complicate an unusual visit to Moscow today and Monday by President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. Ms. Rice, the most senior White House official to visit Russia since the Iraq crisis began bubbling early this year, appeared to be on a mission to smooth relations with the Kremlin in the wake of increasingly acrid disputes over the war.
The Russians already had vigorously protested to the United States earlier this week, after bombs, which they said had come from the American bombing, landed in a residential neighborhood perilously close to the Russian Embassy.
Initial accounts of the attacks today were confused. According to Russian television and the Interfax news service, which cited an unidentified source, the convoy of 23 people and about eight vehicles first came under fire about five miles outside Baghdad.
The convoy later encountered a procession of jeeps about nine miles outside the capital, according to witnesses, and came under fire again when it sent a single automobile forward with a flag to identify itself. But it was unclear at which stop the most serious injuries occurred.
A report on Russian state television RTR, whose journalists were in the convoy, stated that the group appeared to have driven into a firefight between American and Iraqi forces.
That report stated that one embassy employee received a serious bullet wound in the abdomen and that others were more lightly wounded, but made no mention of injuries to the Russian ambassador. The state television report stated that a huge convoy of American armored vehicles later rolled past the Russian cars, one of which had been disabled in the attack.
"We came out of our cars and started waving white cloths to attract attention and ask for medical help," the Russian reporter, Aleksandr Minakov, said by satellite telephone from Jordan. "But no one stopped. The column passed by us for 40 minutes."
While journalists in the convoy continued on to Jordan, reporters said that the diplomatic staff traveled about 35 miles outside Baghdad, to the town of Faludja, so the wounded could be treated in a local hospital.
Word of the attacks came as American officials acknowledged that some of their own forces, as well as leaders of the pro-American Kurdish minority, probably came under mistaken attack from American air power as they drove through northern Iraq on Saturday.
This evening American officials continued to indicate that they believed that the attack on the Russians had come from Iraqi forces. In an interview on CNN, Gen. Peter Pace, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the United States had determined that the Russian convoy had passed safely through western Baghdad into rural Iraq, and that American forces had reported no contact with a convoy resembling the Russian column.
Other American military officials said coalition forces had clear advance information about the convoy and its movements, which had been well advertised before the departure of the embassy's staff.
But Anton Stepanenko, a reporter for Russian state television in Baghdad, reported tonight that the convoy had cleared Iraqi-controlled territory, not ground held by the American-led forces, before being attacked
Also, it seems that the three major channels are broadcasting almost the same story, and they are accusing Americans.
http://www.ntv.ru/news/index.jsp?date=20030407
http://www.vesti.ru/interviews.html?id=5168&tid=14468
http://www.vesti.ru/news.html?id=29912&tid=14468
http://www.1tv.ru/owa/win/ort6_main.mai ... azdel_id=9
Take that, Stas.
Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin
