ON ROADS fringed by burnt-out Iraqi tanks, the twisted carcasses of US military vehicles smouldered yesterday, victims of the guerrilla warfare that has claimed yet another American life.

Paramilitaries fired a rocket-propelled grenade and blew apart a military ambulance near Iskandariyah, 20 miles (32 km) south of Baghdad, killing one army medic and injuring two others. The wounded soldier inside the ambulance survived.

The strike was the third attack on the coalition in 24 hours, and came after the killings of two US soldiers in two days in increasingly daring attacks by unknown assailants. Since the war’s end, 16 US soldiers have been killed in attacks and another 36 have died in accidents.

Militants believed to be in the pay of Saddam Hussein’s outlawed Baath party have also started attacking Iraqis co-operating with the coalition. A mortar shell was fired yesterday at a coalition-run aid office in Samara, to the north of the capital, killing one Iraqi. Earlier 12 others were injured in a botched rocket strike on an American tank in the same town. The US military is in a bind. Intensified military operations to stamp out resistance stoke hostility in a population angry that liberation from Saddam’s brutality has translated into a lack of basic services and little security.

That anger erupted at yesterday’s funeral of a former Iraqi air force officer shot dead the day before when an American soldier fired into a crowd of rioting Iraqi military personnel demanding unpaid salaries. Two people were killed in the firing in front of the coalition’s civilian headquarters.

Despite a coalition ban on carrying weapons in public, ranks of gunmen blasted volleys of bullets into the air and poured scorn on America. “There is no god but Allah, America is the enemy of Allah,” hundreds of furious mourners chanted, as US troops kept their distance from the Baghdad cemetery. “The former regime was 1,000 times more merciful,” one man said.

Iraq’s first opinion poll since the war, indeed in decades, showed that 73 per cent of Baghdad residents think the army has failed to enforce security in the city, which is still plagued by shootings, car-jackings and armed looters.

But in a candid acknowledgement that there is as yet no alternative, only 17 per cent of those polled by the independent Iraqi Institute of Strategic Studies said that the coalition should leave now. Half wanted the US forces to stay until a permanent government had been elected, a process that could take up to two years.

The impunity with which militants are attacking US forces, whose patrols along public roads make them highly vulnerable targets, could encourage further strikes by local militias, shadowy groups with names like “Muhammad’s Army” and the “Iraqi Young Men’s Organisation”.

Hostility can flare at any time. In West Baghdad, an army lorry that broke down just half a mile from an army base was destroyed by a rocket-propelled grenade, the guerrillas’ favoured weapon, in the short time that the rest of its convoy went to seek a tow truck. Beyond a cordon of grim-faced military police guarding the hulk, Iraqi boys squatted and laughed as they repeated the letters “RPG” — the only English they knew.

In the same district on Wednesday two gunmen walked casually up to soldiers overseeing the distribution of cooking gas and shot one in the neck, killing him instantly, and wounded another. They escaped in the panicked crowd.

When the shooting doesn't stop

May 8: soldier shot while directing traffic in Baghdad May 13: airman killed when convoy ambushed on road near Baghdad
May 26: soldier killed when a Humvee ran over unexploded ordnance; soldier killed when convoy was attacked with rocket-propelled grenades and machineguns in Hadithah
May 27: two soldiers killed when unit came under fire in Fallujah
May 28: soldier shot in Anaconda while travelling on a main supply route
June 3: soldier killed by rocket-propelled grenade at checkpoint in Balad
June 5: soldier killed by rocket-propelled grenade in Fallujah
June 7: soldier killed during battle near Tikrit
June 8: soldier shot by men asking for medical help at checkpoint in al-Qaim
June 10: paratrooper killed by a rocket-propelled grenade at a rubbish collection point in Baghdad
June 16: soldier shot on patrol in Baghdad
June 17: soldier shot in the back while on patrol in Baghdad
June 18: soldier shot at a petrol distribution plant in Baghdad
June 19: soldier killed by rocket-propelled grenade fired at a military ambulance in Iskandariyah

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