Iraqi Premier Faults U.S. in Troop Deaths

Iraq’s interim prime minister publicly blamed U.S.-led forces Tuesday for “gross negligence” that led to the massacre of up to 51 American-trained Iraqi soldiers as insurgents carried out new attacks against Iraqi police and national guardsmen and assassinated a local government official.

In remarks to the Iraqi National Council, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said of Saturday’s killings: “This was a horrible crime.... We think that this is due to negligence by the multinational forces.”

Allawi offered no explanation of how his allies had been negligent. He said the Iraqi government would investigate the incident and report back to him within three weeks.

A U.S. military spokesman focused the blame on the insurgents.

“This was a coldblooded and systematic massacre by terrorists. They, and no one else, must be held fully accountable for these heinous acts,” Lt. Col. Steven Boylan said in a prepared statement from the coalition media center in Baghdad.

Allawi’s comments were a rare public criticism of American-led forces by the former exile who was once linked to the CIA. The prime minister has found a firm ally in President Bush and reciprocated last month with an impassioned defense of U.S. involvement in his country during a speech before Congress.

However, as the Iraqi elections approach, Allawi appears to be trying to distance himself from his American backers. Even Iraqis who believe that the U.S. presence is necessary are uncomfortable with some aspects of the military’s behavior.

Iraqi security forces have suffered a rapidly rising death toll in recent months. Although the U.S. military has delivered substantially more equipment to them in that time, some Iraqi officials complain that police, national guard and army personnel lack sufficient training, equipment and protection from insurgent attacks.

Speaking to the National Council on Tuesday, Iraqi Interior Minister Falah Nakib said it would take more than six months to train police well enough to combat “terrorists.”

Since late June, when the interim government was appointed, 92 suicide car bombings have killed 567 people in Iraq, Nakib said, according to news services.

“The Iraqi police are not trained to combat terrorism,” he said. “The Iraqi police are trained to capture criminals and robbers.... We cannot solve these problems in a day and night.”

In the weekend attack, the soldiers, who had just graduated from training at a large military base in eastern Iraq, were ambushed as they were traveling home on leave. Insurgents, wearing police or national guard uniforms, set up a checkpoint and stopped the minibuses carrying the unarmed soldiers.

Most of the soldiers were found lying face down in rows, shot in the back of the head. Others were found on a burned bus in the same area.

Although Iraqis are often fatalistic about the near-constant violence, the troops’ apparent executions horrified many people and even set off a debate among the most radical insurgents about whether the killings were acceptable.

On a website called Al Islah, or Reform, the message board offered sharply differing views.

The victims “deserve punishment in this life and the other life, there is no doubt that they would be at the front lines with the people who employed them [the Americans]. They may be poor and weak but this is not a good enough reason to support the infidels against the mujahedin,” wrote one man who called himself “the Farmer.”

But another, who called himself “Engineer 7,” denounced that view. “You are as happy as if the people who got killed are the Americans. They are Iraqis, and they believe in God. This is a dirty game.”

A similarly chilling incident appeared to be underway Tuesday, as an Arabic website run by a militant group calling itself the Ansar al Sunna Army announced that the group had captured 11 members of the Iraqi national guard between Baghdad and the south-central city of Hillah. The site showed photographs of the guardsmen.

The group claimed responsibility over the weekend for the beheading of an Iraqi who worked for the U.S. military near the northern city of Mosul. Another group, led by Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab Zarqawi, posted a video online Tuesday in which it threatened to behead a Japanese hostage if Tokyo did not withdraw its forces from Iraq within 48 hours, Reuters reported.

Japanese defense officials said that all of their soldiers in Iraq were accounted for. Later, the hostage was identified as Shosei Koda, 24. His parents acknowledged that he was in Iraq, but his business there was not immediately known.

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi rejected the possibility of pulling his troops out of the country. “The Self-Defense Forces will not withdraw from Iraq,” he said.

In other violence Tuesday, a roadside explosive hit a police convoy in Baqubah, and a second group of police was struck by another blast when its members came to the convoy’s rescue. One police officer was killed, and seven officers and two civilians were injured.

Just 15 minutes later, a city council member from the Baqubah area was killed when three unidentified assassins armed with machine guns attacked his car. A bodyguard died as well.

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Times staff writer Bruce Wallace in Tokyo contributed to this report.