Foreign envoys attacked in Iraq

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Al Qaeda's wing in Iraq claimed responsibility yesterday for the kidnapping Saturday of Egypt's top diplomat in the country, as insurgents mounted new attacks against Arab and Muslim envoys in Baghdad.

Iraqi government officials and Arab news outlets in the region reported the incidents as an apparent campaign by insurgents to send a message to any country attempting to boost diplomatic ties with Iraq's new government.

Gunmen yesterday shot at the car of Pakistan's ambassador, who survived the ambush, and Bahrain's top envoy suffered a gunshot wound to the hand in what his government called an attempt by insurgents to kidnap him.

Also yesterday, in an audiotape posted on the Internet and reported by the Associated Press, Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, said the Iraqi army is as great an enemy as the Americans. He also announced the formation of a new terror command to fight Iraq's biggest Shi'ite militia.

The tape challenged critics who maintain that fighting U.S. troops is legitimate, but who oppose attacks on Iraqi forces.

"Some say that the resistance is divided into two groups -- an honorable resistance that fights the nonbeliever-occupier and a dishonorable resistance that fights Iraqis," the speaker said on the tape. "We announce that the Iraqi army is an army of apostates and mercenaries that has allied itself with the crusaders and came to destroy Islam and fight Muslims. We will fight it."

In a separate attack on diplomats Sunday, two cars belonging to the Russian Embassy in Baghdad were riddled with bullets while traveling along the road to Baghdad airport. No embassy personnel were wounded, Russian officials said.

The attacks come on the heels of the abduction Saturday of Egyptian ambassador-designate Ihab al-Sherif, who was kidnapped while walking alone on a Baghdad street.

Iraqi government spokesman Laith Kuba told reporters the kidnapping was part of an effort to "scare the other diplomatic missions so that they won't expand their presence in Iraq."

In an interview with Al Jazeera, Abd al-Sattar Jawad, the chief editor of the al-Siyada (Sovereignty) newspaper in Iraq, said the incidents were "intended to prove that the Iraqi government is too weak to defend the embassies and diplomats."