Iraq's resistance war was planned

The bodies of two missing American soldiers were found yesterday as news emerged that a growing campaign of Iraqi resistance to coalition occupation may have been planned before the war began.

Allied officials now believe that a document recently found in Iraq detailing an 'emergency plan' for looting and sabotage in the wake of an invasion is probably authentic. It was prepared by the Iraqi intelligence service in January and marked 'top secret'. It outlined 11 kinds of sabotage, including burning government offices, cutting power and communication lines and attacking water purification plants.

What gives the document particular credence is that it appears to match exactly the growing chaos and large number of guerrilla attacks on coalition soldiers, oil facilities and power plants.

At least 61 US troops have died in Iraq since major combat was declared to be over on 1 May, including at least 23 in attacks. The latest death came on Friday when a soldier was killed in an ambush, and another shot in the neck and critically injured. Grenades were thrown at a US convoy as it passed through the Thawra area, a poor, mainly Shia Muslim part of the capital that had been largely free of anti-American violence.

US officials dismiss their casualties as 'militarily insignificant' and point out that there are 55,000 US troops in Baghdad. But the repeated attacks damage the forces' image of invulnerability and lead to harsher security measures that risk alienating swaths of the population.

A series of major operations involving hundreds of arrests have apparently failed to quell the unrest, much of which is believed to be committed by criminals hired by wealthy former Baath Party officials. Some attacks are also sponsored, security offi cials believe, by hardline religious groups.

It is not known who was behind Friday's attack although the prime suspects are Sunni Muslims from the west of Baghdad, where resistance to the US has so far been strongest. It is possible that they chose to attack Americans in a Shia Muslim area to bolster the impression that Iraq's majority Shia population, who have hitherto been relatively supportive of the occupying forces, are joining the fight against the coalition.

The spiral of violence has also hit British troops after six military policeman were killed and eight other soldiers injured in the southern Iraqi town of Majar Kabir. Yesterday UK troops returned to the village where the men were killed after dropping leaflets promising that there would be no 'mass punishment'.

Military officials insisted they were not offering an amnesty to those who were responsible for the killings. 'The priority is to win back the hearts and minds of the people,' an Army spokesman said. 'But by doing that one of the benefits will be that hope fully we will be able to catch the people responsible. There is certainly no amnesty.'

There is still no explanation of why the RMP detachment was not assisted by the substantial British forces near by when it was surrounded by an angry mob. Sources within the RMP in the UK told The Observer they suspected that the detachment may have been short of ammunition. One soldier recently returned from Iraq said that a shortage had led to ammunition being taken from military policemen to give to frontline units.

'When I was in Kosovo we had to borrow ammo and grenades off the Para Regiment to feel as though we were suitably armed when isolated. Apparently we were "policemen not soldiers", so we weren't issued it,' one source said. 'I know from friends in the Gulf that they had had a lot of ammo withdrawn because of this attitude. It cost them their lives.'

British military officials dismissed the claims last night. 'The idea that we send anyone out without enough ammunition is simply rubbish,' one said.