The International Red Cross is today considering whether to scale down its relief operations in Iraq following a succession of suicide bombings that brought chaos to the capital Baghdad yesterday.
Foreign IRC staff are leaving Iraq today, but local workers are set to continue the organisation's work until a final decision is taken.
Four blasts hit the International Red Cross headquarters and three police stations, yesterday killing nearly 40 people and injuring more than 200 in the city's bloodiest day since the fall of Saddam Hussein.
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In Washington, Pentagon officials said they believed loyalists of Saddam and foreign terrorists were responsible, with US President George W. Bush claiming insurgents had become more "desperate" because of "progress" in Iraq.
"There are indicators that certainly these attacks have a mode of operation of foreign fighters," US Brigadier General Mark Hertling told reporters in Baghdade, adding that one attacker captured in a foiled raid on a police station had a Syrian passport.
"He's a foreign fighter. He had a Syrian passport and the policemen claim that as he was shot and fell that he said he was Syrian," Gen Hertling said, echoing previous US statements that al-Qaeda and other foreign militants were operating in Iraq.
Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Colin Powell urged the Red Cross and other organisations - including foreign contractors and the United Nations - to stay in Iraq. "They are needed. Their work is needed. And if they are driven out, then the terrorists win," he said.
Sir Nicholas Young, chief executive of the British Red Cross, said the agency may be forced to pull out of Baghdad following the attack. "There is a huge amount of work that we desperately want to carry on doing there, but ultimately a dead Red Cross worker isn't any use to Iraq."
Paris-based Medecins Sans Frontieres said it would reduce its seven-member expatriate team in Iraqi's capital.
The first strike yesterday came at around 8.30 a.m. when an ambulance packed with explosives rammed into security barriers outside the Red Cross compound, killing 12. Another 27 died in three more car bombs targeting police stations around the city.
A fifth attack on a central Baghdad police station was thwarted when officers stopped a suicide bomber before he could detonate his Land Cruiser.
Prime Minister Tony Blair spoke out after the bombings. His spokesman said: "The Prime Minister utterly condemns these evil and wicked attacks. "The terrorists and criminals responsible for them are obviously the enemies of the Iraqi people in as much as they are deliberately targeting those organisations who are helping to build towards a free and stable Iraq. But that work will continue."
The blasts come a day after a rocket attack on Baghdad's Al Rashid Hotel, where US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying.
Three more American soldiers were killed on Sunday night, two in Baghdad and one in Abu Ghraib on the western edge of the city, US officials said. Four others were wounded in the two attacks.