With news out today that the WMD team in Iraq has been instructed to change its focus on finding WMDs to establishing Saddams intent to produce them, some stories are emerging on the hard streets of occupied Iraq:

'The Bush administration yesterday vowed to stay the course in Iraq despite the attacks in Fallujah that ended with jubilant Iraqis dragging the charred bodies of Americans through the streets.

Until yesterday, Washington's explanation of the continuing violence in Iraq was straightforward: now that the military is making itself harder to hit, the insurgents are switching to "soft targets": Iraqis who co-operated with the occupiers, and foreign contractors and other civilian workers.

Yesterday's bloody events, however, comprehensively disproved that theory.

Five US soldiers were killed when their M-113 armoured personnel carrier ran over a bomb in the countryside close to the city of Fallujah. Meanwhile, US cable channels showed heavily edited images of the burning shells of two sports utility vehicles in Fallujah itself, in which four foreign contractors, at least three of them Americans and another a woman, were ambushed, according to the US. What was not shown was footage of charred corpses being mutilated, dragged through the streets and hanged from a bridge in front of a crowd of Iraqis.

The scenes echoed those of Mogadishu in 1993, when a mob killed US soldiers and hauled their bodies through the streets - so dismaying and unnerving the public here that the new Clinton administration shortly afterwards withdrew US peacekeeping forces from Somalia.

Given President George Bush's repeated insistence that the US will not pull out of Iraq until security and order are established, and his determination to show he is tougher than his predecessor, no such action is likely now.

"We will not turn back from our effort," Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, told reporters, blaming the atrocity on supporters of Saddam Hussein and others who were "doing everything they can" to try to prevent the transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi government, scheduled for 30 June.

"There are terrorists, there are some remnants of the former regime that are enemies of freedom and enemies of demo-cracy, but democracy is taking root," Mr McClellan said. "We are making progress."

Nonetheless, the gruesome photos from Fallujah circulating on the internet yesterday were proof that Iraq remains a dangerous place where foreign soldiers and contractors alike venture at their peril - exactly the message, of course, that the insurgents intended to send.

The deaths of the five soldiers are a separate reminder that US forces in Iraq are suffering losses almost daily.

In the 335 days since President Bush proclaimed an end to "major combat operations" on 1 May 2003, 461 US servicemen have died, almost four times as many as during the six week-long war proper, and at least 3,000 have been wounded. So commonplace have the ambushes and attacks become that they rarely make news-paper front pages or the nightly news bulletins.

But even on its own, the killing of the five soldiers from the First Infantry Division near Fallujah would have made yesterday one of the bloodiest days yet for the US military, with a death toll exceeded only when troop helicopters have been shot down or crashed.'

Rupert Cornwall, The British Independent Newspaper

'It was an especially terrible day in Iraq. Five US marines were killed only 20 miles from Fallujah by a roadside bom and 15 Iraqis were wounded by a car bomb in the city of Baquba.......as usual Iraqi dead were not counted by the occupation powers. But it will be the video tapes of four Westerners slaughtered yesterday, shown on Arabic television but not on American television, which is censored, that will be remembered'

Rupert Cornwall, the British Independent newspaper.

'Four Westerners were dragged from their car, stoned, burned and beaten with metal piping. Then they were set alight, decapitated and dragged through the streets with meathooks attached behind cars.

In the past few weeks, attacks on foreigners have become an almost daily occurence

The Americans have not suffered this scale of casualties for several months.

Yesterday, General Mark Kimmit boasted that the US marines were encountering fewer security problems in Fallujah and were 'pleased with the way how they were moving progressively forward'.

Despite Kimmits claims that yesterdays results were the work of 'outsiders', elsewhere in the US military, there is a growing acceptance that the increasing number of attacks in Iraq is being conducted by home grown guerilla organisations.

The headquarters of the US administrator, Paul Bremer, is now surrounded by massive walls of concrete and steel, and yet the palace grounds are hit almost nightly by mortar fire. Bremers presidential palace now looks like residency of the British Raj in Lucknow during the Indian mutiny. For this is now what we have come to in Bagdhad: foreigners on the run. 

(Robert Fisk, British Independent Newspaper)

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