Insurgents vow to behead Marine

Videotapes broadcast by Arab television yesterday showed two hostages held in Iraq by insurgents who said one was a U.S. Marine and threatened to behead both.

Military officials in Baghdad last night said a corporal of Lebanese descent assigned to the First Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq has been “absent since June 21.”

Although officials said they could not confirm that Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun had been taken hostage, a video broadcast by the Al Jazeera network claimed that the kidnapped man had the same name.

The video showed a man in camouflage with a trimmed mustache and card identifying him as an “active duty” Marine. A white blindfold covered his eyes.

Iraqi terrorists also are holding three Turkish contractors under threat of death unless Turks end cooperation with the U.S.-led coalition, a demand Turkey said yesterday it would not consider.

Meanwhile, a U.S. transport plane was hit by small-arms fire yesterday and there were explosions in and around Baghdad, as part of a pattern of escalating violence leading up to Wednesday’s transfer of sovereignty in Iraq.

National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice yesterday said Iraq’s new government intends to use members of Saddam Hussein’s former army to fill the ranks of the country’s security forces after the transfer of power.

The Iraqis plan to use well-trained personnel from Saddam’s army, although the new government “is as concerned as everybody that people with blood on their hands not be brought back,” she told “Fox News Sunday.”

Noting the transfer of sovereignty will proceed as planned, Miss Rice called it “obvious that those who have no future in the new Iraq and the foreign terrorists are trying to derail this political transition.”

One U.S. soldier was killed yesterday when a mortar round slammed into a U.S. camp on the outskirts of Baghdad, and a U.S. citizen died from the small-arms fire that struck a U.S. Air Force C-130 transport shortly after it took off from the Iraqi capital.

The plane made an emergency landing in Baghdad, where five Iraqis, including a child, were reportedly killed when mortar shells hit the eastern bank of the Tigris river that snakes through the city’s center.

Also yesterday, gunmen dressed in black killed six soldiers of the Iraqi National Guard, formerly the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, and wounded four others at a checkpoint in Jalawla, 75 miles northeast of Baghdad.

Al Jazeera, meanwhile, said a group calling itself the Islamic Response Movement, the security wing of the “1920 Revolution Brigades,” was behind the kidnapping of a Marine after luring him from a U.S. base.

A brief video showed a man dressed in camouflage sitting in a chair while his captors held a sword above his head. A Marine Corps identity card named him as Wassef Ali Hassoun. Other official documents also displayed his name.

The TV network said the group threatened to behead the man if their demands were not met, but did not set a deadline. It was not clear what the group’s demands were.

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