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Jack Straw greeted with rockets in Baghdad

By Atul Aneja

MANAMA Nov. 26. Iraqi resistance forces fired rockets last night at the compound where the visiting British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, who arrived on an unannounced visit to Baghdad was staying, setting of sirens and forcing helicopters to take-off as flares lit the night sky. Mr. Straw later told reporters that he was unaware of the detonations that shook Baghdad on Tuesday night after Iraqi guerillas fired at least two rockets towards the well-fortified high security zone where top U.S. occupation authorities reside.

The explosions did not cause any casualties, but triggered urgent announcements over loudspeakers of an emergency at one of the former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's palace complexes. Iraqi fighters had last month struck with rockets at the Al Rashid hotel, narrowly missing the visiting U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defence, Paul Wolfowitz, who was staying there then. Mr. Straw acknowledged that security conditions in Iraq were tough and called for a quicker transfer of power to the Iraqis to improve the situation. "I'm absolutely sure that a more rapid political process will assist the security situation,'' he said at a press conference, adding that Iraq would be "a far better place" after the planned political transition to Iraqi rule was completed by the end of June.

Pointing to the urgency of the transition to Iraqi rule, Mr. Straw hinted that a prolongation of the Anglo-American endangered Iraq's political disintegration. Iraq has a mixed population of Sunnis, majority Shias in the South, and ethnic Kurds in the north. In shifting tactics, the U.S. occupation forces in a raid on Tuesday captured the wife and daughter of Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, a top member of Mr. Hussein's inner circle, whom the Americans accuse of being the kingpin behind the growing Iraqi resistance.

Lieutenant Colonel William MacDonald, a military spokesman in Mr. Hussein's hometown in Tikrit said the two women, along with a son of Mr. Ibrahim's doctor, were captured on Tuesday morning during a raid in the town of Samarra.

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