Rocket Kills an Iraqi in Baghdad Neighborhood

In a rare daytime bombardment of a civilian area by insurgents, a rocket crashed into the pavement outside the city’s International Trade Fair grounds Sunday, killing at least one passerby and wounding at least five others. An earlier attack west of Baghdad claimed the lives of two U.S. soldiers.

Four other rockets fell inside or near the U.S.-led coalition’s Green Zone, the heavily fortified 4-square-mile district of former palaces and government buildings being used as the headquarters of the U.S.-led occupation authority and chief administrator L. Paul Bremer III. One soldier was reported to have suffered minor injuries.

The barrage Sunday morning seemed intended to send a message that Baghdad had not been completely pacified one year after the start of the U.S.-led war that ousted dictator Saddam Hussein.

During last year’s war, Mansour, the upscale neighborhood where the rocket hit near the trade fair grounds, was the target of intensive bombing by allied warplanes and rockets. Those attacks demolished part of the facility -- at the time occupied by Iraqi troops and their antiaircraft guns -- as well as the nearby headquarters of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

This month, the trade fair was preparing its first postwar exhibition to attract international business.

The midmorning scene after the rocket landed seemed, on a much smaller scale, like a playback of the war: cars pierced by shrapnel, shattered glass on the asphalt, broken shop windows, rescuers picking up the bleeding wounded and rushing them to the nearby Yarmuk Hospital.

And like one year ago, there was anger on the street directed at the United States. Residents held up fragments of the rocket shell, pointing to letters and numbers on the inside of the jagged cases that some vociferously argued proved it was a U.S. -- not a guerrilla -- attack.

Others said they held the United States responsible because it has not been able to impose order since it arrived here.

“This stinks,” said a businessman in a brown woolen suit and tie, who gave his name only as Mariati. “Innocent people walking by, their lives taken away.”

“These actions are done now and then so that the Americans can have a pretext to stay in Iraq,” chimed in Adnan Bakr, 35, a salesman from Basra.

At the hospital, several victims receiving first aid lay moaning in the emergency ward as anguished relatives rushed in.

Dr. Raad Abdul Sahed, 24, had seen it all before. He treated patients here last year during the war, he said. “I think it was a very shrewd idea of President Bush to transfer the war to Iraq and keep it away from your country,” he said.

Sahed said one Iraqi had died and 11 had been injured, one seriously, in the attack. A statement released by the U.S. military said two people had been killed and five wounded.

“This is occupation, not liberation,” shouted Bayda Ahmad, 40, the aunt of taxi driver Ahmad Khalid Awad, 27, who lay in a hospital bed in clothing soaked with blood from a leg wound. “Men wounded and children are dying. Bremer should have control over his soldiers. I think things were better under Saddam’s regime.”

There were few details given about the deaths of the two U.S. Army soldiers, who were killed around 8 p.m. Saturday at a base near Fallouja, west of Baghdad. Spokesman Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said only that they were hit by three rockets. Six soldiers and a member of the U.S. Navy were wounded.

Several mortar rounds also struck a U.S. military base near Ramadi, injuring three Marines. They were flown to Germany for medical treatment.

Kimmitt said U.S. investigators were still looking into an incident in which two reporters for the Arab satellite television channel Al Arabiya were shot dead, allegedly by U.S. troops near a checkpoint.

Kimmitt said military investigators hoped to complete their inquiry within two days.

Times staff writers Alissa J. Rubin in Baghdad and Tony Perry in Ramadi, along with Zaidoon Asim Abdul Wahab of The Times’ Baghdad Bureau, contributed to this report.