Victims of Irbil's twin explosion toll 109, Japanese forces prepare to deploy in Iraq

Some 90 military men constitute the first Japanese unit to be deployed in Iraq, arrived yesterday at Abdullah al-Mubarak air base near Kuwait. Most members of this unit are engineers in addition to security men for protecting them.

Among tasks assigned to them is the building of a camp at the outskirt of al-Samawa city to the south of Iraq, where the Japanese forces will be stationed. Those soldiers will be subjected to training at Virginia camp in Kuwait that will last for one week before they will head to Samawa.

Other units, including 600 soldiers will be arriving by the fall of March. Since January 19, some 40 members of the reconnaissance force belong to the Japanese land force have been positioned in Samawa.

Meantime, Singapore announced yesterday it had sent 31 members of the air force to the Middle East in the efforts to rebuild Iraq. Singapore deployed 191 soldiers in Iraq and dispatched 32 policemen there last Summer as a contribution to train the Iraqi police.

The arrival of the infantry group of the Japanese forces to the region coincides with the continued security deterioration in Iraq. One explosive went off near a patrol for the British forces on a road in al-Basra to the south of Iraq yesterday morning, but no human casualties nor material damages were reported.

Two mortars fell on Tuesday evening near Abu Gharib prison near Baghdad. The occupation forces said it arrested 11 persons after the attack and confiscated weapons.

Two Iraqi civilians were injured in mortars attacks that targeted the American forces on Tuesday evening in al-Ramadi, to the west of Baghdad. The attacks raised a strong reaction by the air borne 82 American contingent stationed in the region, from which the heavy artillery shelling fired. This resulted in destroying five houses and two cars.

Meantime, the Kurdish member in the Interim Governing Council, Mahmoud Othman, said that the number of killed persons in the twin explosions in Irbil, to the north of Iraq, increased to 109, after the death of many wounded of the two explosions. Other 125 among the 250 wounded in the two explosions are still in hospitals with many of them are in critical conditions.

One American soldier was killed on Tuesday and another wounded in a bomb explosion on a sideline to the south of Baghdad.