a the university daily kansan
news
thursday, april 22, 2004
Supplies short in Iraq after wave of attacks
Knight Ridder Newspapers
BAGHDAD, Iraq — The shortages became noticeable when soap and deodorant disappeared from American contract shop shelves, and salads and sweets became scarce at dining halls catering to the U.S.-led coalition. Around the same time, U.S. forces dipped into their ammunition and fuel reserves.
Two weeks into a wave of attacks that have destroyed dozens of convos carrying crucial goods to the capital, the insurgent campaign has disrupted life for the U.S.-led coalition — even in the Green Zone, the city within this city where U.S. Administrator L. Paul Bremer and 5,000 coalition members live and work.
The experience has under-
scored how isolated the American operation is from the Iraqi society it's trying to transform. Outside the zone, life goes on.
"We're a-OK on fuel and a-OK
on ammo again. We're starting to build our stocks up," a senior coalition military official said in a background briefing this week, trying to reassure reporters that supply routes are being re-established. He declined to specify when or for long they weren't a OK.
Some of the same supply problems that bedeviled the initial U.S.-led invasion are back smack in the center of Baghdad, inside the 4-square-mile zone that functions on an independent economy not unlike Berlin behind the wall.
With food supplies short, military planners have been considering for days whether to unpack their cases of field rations, called MREs, for everyone from foreign service officers to soldiers securing the barricades around the compound.
Military officers say insurgents trying to uproot the U.S.-led occupation have periodically attacked convos since coalition forces invaded Iraq a year ago.
A truck that was part of a U.S. military convoy burned after an attack on a highway that leads to Airport Road on Friday. Recent attacks on convoys carrying fuel and other supplies in the past two weeks have severely reduced the flow of food, fuel and other supplies for American troops into the capital.
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