Red Cross pledges to remain in Iraq
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has announced that it will remain in Iraq, but plans to reduce its foreign staff.
The decision follows a terrorist bomb attack on the organisation’s headquarters in Baghdad on Monday.
Around 40 people, including two ICRC workers, were killed in a series of co-ordinated suicide attacks in the Iraqi capital.
The ICRC, which employs around 30 international and 600 Iraqi staff in Iraq, has stressed that it is not pulling out of the country.
“The ICRC is not withdrawing from Iraq,” said Pierre Kraehenbuehl, the agency’s director of operations.
“We are reducing the number of our international staff and increasing measures for the security of the remaining staff.
“We have no choice but to adapt the way we work in Iraq.”
On Tuesday, US secretary of state Colin Powell appealed to the head of the ICRC not to pull its foreign staff out of Iraq.
Red Cross staff will now be given the option to stay or leave. However, the ICRC said it was imperative, under the terms of the Geneva Convention, that it remained in Iraq while the country was occupied.
Medecins Sans Frontieres has also announced it will pull out four of its seven international staff in Iraq following Monday’s blast.
Meanwhile, the deaths of two US soldiers killed by a roadside bomb north of Baghdad, means that more US soldiers have now been killed in Iraq since the end of major hostilities was declared on May 1st than died during the war itself.
Two soldiers were killed and another was wounded when an explosive device hit their vehicle on Tuesday night.
The deaths brought to 116 the number of US soldiers killed in hostile action since the end of the war, compared with 115 US combat deaths during the US-led invasion, according to official figures.
