"They should have come and just given us food and some security," he said. "Even today I feel like I cannot drive my car at night because of Ali Baba (the Baghdad slang for criminals)."
"It was then I realized that they had come as occupiers and not as liberators," he says. "And my colleagues and I then voted to fight. So we began to meet and plan. We met with others and have tried to buy weapons. None of us are afraid to die, but it is hard. We are just men, workers, not soldiers."

Saddam Hussein withdrew more than $1 billion (580 million pounds) from Iraq's central bank hours before U.S. forces invaded, and some of the money may be funding the Iraqi insurgency against U.S. troops, ABC News has reported.
Quoting a letter purportedly written by Saddam and obtained by ABC News, and citing U.S. officials, ABC News said on Wednesday $132 million of funds withdrawn by the former Iraqi leader is unaccounted for and may be being used by his followers to fund attacks against U.S. forces.
ABC News said the handwritten letter from Saddam, dated March 19, 2003, was found by U.S. agents in the files of the Iraqi central bank, and obtained by ABC News.

The government has extended the mission of the Dutch forces in Iraq by six months. An extra reconnaissance unit of the Commando Corps will be sent to Iraq to gather information on the situation in the south of al-Muthanna province.

Dutch Defence Minister Henk Kamp plans to send four Apache military helicopters to Afghanistan. If approved, the mission will involve the deployment of between 60 and 100 military personnel. The Dutch helicopters are likely to be deployed in and around the Afghan capital, Kabul.

The United States has raised the death toll from intense clashes with insurgents in the Iraqi town of Samarra to 54, after reports from Iraqi doctors that eight civilians were killed by US fire in the exchanges.
A hospital director in Samarra says another 60 civilians were injured.
US commanders previously said they had they killed 46 Iraqi insurgents in the clashes.
The hospital says a woman and child were amongst the eight civilians who died in the fighting.

The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has acknowledged it "lacked specific information" about alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction when it compiled an intelligence estimate last year that served to justify the US-led invasion of Iraq.
[...]
... an explanation issued over the weekend by veteran CIA analyst Stuart Cohen, who was in charge of putting together the 2002 intelligence estimate and currently serves as vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, made clear the case against Iraq, as presented by the CIA behind closed doors, was much less clear-cut and more nuanced.
[...]
The document still concluded that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of the 150-kilometre limit imposed by the UN Security Council.
It also said that Baghdad did not have nuclear weapons.
Mr Cohen said he still stood by those judgments.
[...]
Moreover, specialists from three US government agencies - the State and Energy Departments and the Air Force - vocally disagreed with at least some of the findings, the CIA analyst said, who denied that these expressions of dissent had been somehow suppressed or buried in footnotes.
" All agencies were fully exposed to these alternative views, and the heads of those organisations blessed the wording and placement of their alternative views ," Mr Cohen said.
The veteran CIA analyst stressed that all major conclusions about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction had been drawn on the basis of information "overwhelmingly" gleaned from a combination of human intelligence, satellite imagery and communications intercepts.
" There is a reason that the October 2002 review of Iraq's WMD programs is called a National Intelligence Estimate and not a National Intelligence factbook ," Mr Cohen said.
" On almost any issue of the day that we face, hard evidence will only take intelligence professionals so far ."

A seven-year-old child brandishing a Kalashnikov was shot in the foot by US troops during a raid in the hotspot city of Ramadi, west of Baghdad, the US military said.
"[Troops] conducted a mission in the Ramadi area today. While on patrol, the soldiers witnessed two men with weapons running into a nearby residence. The soldiers followed the men in order to apprehend them for questioning ," a Central Command statement said.
" Upon approaching the house, a seven-year-old child came out with an AK-47 rifle pointed at the soldiers. A soldier responded in self-defence and shot the child in the foot. "
The statement said the child was evacuated to a nearby army medical facility for treatment and then flown to Baghdad.