Insurgents fired a rocket into a hotel Sunday evening in Tikrit, killing 15 Iraqis and wounding eight, as Prime Minister Ayad Allawi issued repeated warnings that negotiations with the rebels holding another central Iraqi town, Fallujah, were swiftly running out of time and that an attack to retake the territory was imminent.
And gunmen killed the deputy governor of Baghdad as he was on his way to work Monday, Iraqi officials said, according to The Associated Press. Hatim Kamil was assassinated in a drive-by shooting, said Baghdad Gov. Ali al-Haidari.
Also Sunday, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi repeated his vow to keep about 550 troops in Iraq after the government confirmed that the decapitated body found on a street in Baghdad was Shosei Koda, a 24-year-old Japanese tourist who was kidnapped by the militant group of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
“We cannot lose to terrorism, we must not yield to brute force,” said Koizumi, who immediately rejected the group’s demand Wednesday to withdraw its troops from Samawah, in southern Iraq, leveraged by the threat to behead Koda.
The rocket attack, at about 7:50 p.m., struck a hotel where itinerant Shiite workers often stay, a new Iraqi satellite television channel, Al-Sharqiyah, quoted a local police chief as saying. Tikrit, about 100 miles north of Baghdad, was Saddam Hussein’s hometown and is dominated by Sunni Muslims.
The rocket, which struck the second story of the hotel, was one of two fired by insurgents; the second landed harmlessly, said Master Sgt. Robert Cowens, a spokesman for the U.S. Army’s 1st Infantry Division.
During a meeting with reporters Sunday inside Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, Allawi said that unless his government was allowed to establish control of Fallujah immediately, he would ask the American and Iraqi forces massed around the city to attack.
Allawi said that Saturday night, he met with tribal and religious leaders from Fallujah and Ramadi, where clashes broke out early Sunday between insurgents and U.S. Marines.
But there was little sign of any progress, and the prime minister made it clear that chances for a peaceful settlement were fading rapidly.
“The time is closing down, really,” Allawi said. “I am not putting a time schedule, but we are approaching the end.”
