President Saddam Hussein offered Thursday to help the US relief effort in the wake of last week's suicide bombings, saying Iraq had become an expert in the field thanks to American attacks.
"I say to the Americans that if they seek the help of experts in Iraq, Iraqis could agree to give them assistance for humanitarian reasons," he said, quoted by the official news agency INA.
"Iraqis have good experience in rescue operations thanks to the Americans who have resorted to weapons of mass destruction against Iraq," he said in a meeting with Military Industrialization Minister Abdul Tawab Mulla Howeish.
"The Americans have destroyed many buildings, bridges, churches, mosques and palaces, and that's why the Iraqis have gained such a lot of experience in rescue work and in pulling survivors out of the rubble," the president said.
Saddam pointed to the US bombing, during the 1991 Gulf War over Kuwait, of Al-Nassiriya bridge in southern Iraq "when 400 people, including children and the elderly, perished in American missile explosions".
"The Americans dropped 200,000 tons of bombs on Iraq in 1991 and [a US-British air war in] December 1998," he said.
"After all this, the Americans should have turned to Iraqi experts for the reconstruction" of New York, where the World Trade Center was destroyed in suicide plane bombings, said Saddam.
"We would have reconnected the electricity, water and telephone lines."
Saddam, a leading foe of Washington and the only Arab leader not to have condemned the September 11 terror strikes in New York and Washington, warned Tuesday of a clash between Christianity and Islam in case of US retaliation -- BAGHDAD (AFP)
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
