NYT, BAGHDAD, Iraq – Faced with a U.S. military crackdown using all the paraphernalia of high-technology warfare, Iraqi insurgents resorted Friday to the humblest of creatures and the simplest of transports to carry out what U.S. officers called “spectacular'' strikes against heavily fortified targets in Baghdad.
The attackers used four donkey carts disguised as hay wagons to haul homemade multiple rocket- launchers close to several of the most heavily defended sites in the city, including the 20-story Palestine and Sheraton hotels on the banks of the Tigris river, and the oil ministry on whose management Iraq's hopes for oil wealth depend.
The donkeys were tethered to trees, with the rockets inserted inside homemade launchers, and linked to car batteries and time fuses, and hidden under hay.
But allied to these “contraptions,'' as one U.S. officer called them, were powerful battlefield rockets. Several feet long and as big around as a fire hose, they were said by U.S. officers to have been either Soviet-made 107-mm Katusha or Brazilian-made 122-mm Aspros of a kind stockpiled by Saddam's army before the U.S. invasion, with a range of up to 10 miles.
One American working for Kellogg, Brown and Root, one of the largest U.S. companies in reconstruction here, was seriously injured when his 15th floor room at the Palestine hotel took a direct hit.
The U.S. military command said the man, who was not named, was in critical condition with head and chest injuries and would be evacuated to the Landstuhl American military hospital in Germany.
Donkeys Prevented Damage
Many of the rockets failed to fire. Those that did struck with great force. Four holes at least as big as soccer balls were punched in the outer walls of the Palestine hotel, throwing showers of concrete chunks and glass into three upper floors, and filling corridors with thick, grimy dust.
At the adjacent Sheraton, a rocket severed the cables of an external, glass-encased elevator and sent it plunging to the ground, smashing the glass roof of the atrium and sending shards showering into the lobby. No one was injured.
An upper floor of the oil ministry caught fire, but there were no reported injuries in a building that, unlike the hotels filled with foreign journalists and other outsiders, was virtually deserted at the start of a Muslim prayer day.
The U.S. military command swiftly issued a citywide alert after the attacks.
Many carts plying the city's streets, delivering hay, collecting scrap and bearing other loads, then came under stone- throwing attacks and curses by jumpy Iraqis if they lingered anywhere for long.
Ironically, the donkeys, all of which survived, appeared to have played a part in limiting the severity of the attacks.
Iraqis who were outside the Palestine hotel at the time of the attack said the donkey there had started so violently after the first volley of rockets singed his backside that he upset the cart, toppling the launcher onto its side, spilling the battery onto the street and disrupting the firing mechanism.
Outside the Italian Embassy, Iraqis said the donkey there had begun munching on the hay, exposing the rocket launcher and setting off the alarm that led to it being disarmed before it could fire.
Another donkey cart carrying rockets was spotted by a suspicious shopkeeper and disarmed before it could detonate near the Italian and Turkish embassies and the headquarters of a Kurdish political party in Baghdad.
Yet another donkey cart was found near a law school and an adjacent U.S. military camp farther down the Tigris, with still more rockets under a mound of hay. It, too, was disarmed.
`Spectacular Attacks'
U.S. commanders said they had no immediate suspects in the attacks.
The donkey carts yielded few clues, beyond the sort of hand-lettered inscriptions that Middle Eastern carters commonly inscribe on their vehicles.
“Allah, Mohammed, Ali,'' one said, invoking the Shiite Muslim trinity of God, the Prophet Mohammed and the Shiites first imam, Ali. Another legend read: “My love, my heart is with you, my dear.''
Although the attacks fell short of the horror of recent suicide bombings that killed dozens at the U.N. compound and the Red Cross headquarters, they appeared intended to have maximum psychological impact on Baghdad's increasingly fearful 5.5 million people.
“These are spectacular attacks,'' said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, chief spokesman for the U.S. military command. He described those mounting attacks across Iraq as “an adaptive, ingenious enemy,'' but said they knew that they could not prevail in a direct confrontation with the 155,000 coalition troops, all but 25,000 of them Americans.
