IRAQ: The gruesome death of an Iraqi man whose head was shot off inflamed anti-American rage in the volatile town of Ramadi yesterday after a night of armed attacks which wounded four US troops.
Several Iraqis gathered around the man's bullet-riddled car, where a piece of skull lay among the shattered windshield glass on the floorboard.
Another crowd walked past pools of blood at Ramadi General Hospital and watched a doctor pull plastic sheeting off the corpse, which was punctured by bullets onlookers said were fired by US troops occupying the town, around 100km west of Baghdad.
"You will see what will happen to the Americans now. You will see what we will do to them," hospital administrator Mr Taha Hussein said.
On Saturday, seven recruits to a US-backed Iraqi police force were killed in Ramadi when a remote-controlled bomb exploded outside a police station.
Ramadi is part of a mainly Sunni Muslim area to the north and west of Baghdad where US forces have faced much of the most violent resistance to their occupation of Iraq. The region was a bastion of support for Saddam Hussein, himself a Sunni.
"The Americans are terrorists. They don't respect us. They enter our houses and frisk our women. They handcuff us at checkpoints and step on our necks," said Mr Abu Mohsen.
"Now look at this. They just shoot at cars and kill innocent people," he said.
The circumstances surrounding the death of the man, identified by a hospital official as Mr Ibrahim Himoud, were unclear.
Iraqi witnesses said US troops brought him to the hospital and said he was shot after ignoring a checkpoint. They also said a second civilian was killed.
A US military spokesman said the decapitated man was caught in crossfire after six Iraqis ambushed a US position.
A spokesman in Baghdad said four soldiers had been wounded in the ambush. - (Reuters)