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New Spanish PM Promises
Iraq withdrawal

By Simon Jeffery

16 March, 2004
The Guardian

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, whose socialist party yesterday won a sensational election victory, today vowed to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq.
The prime minister elect used his first full media interview since last night to affirm that he intended to follow through on what had become a key election promise.

"The Spanish troops in Iraq will come home," he told Cadena Ser radio.

Mr Zapatero's campaign pledge was to keep troops in Iraq until June 30 - as Madrid had previously pledged - and withdraw them if the US had not handed over power to the UN by that date.

He said today that no decision on the 1,300 Spanish troops in Iraq would be taken until he was in power and had consulted widely, but insisted he did not intend for them to stay. He told Cadena Ser: "The war has been a disaster [and] the occupation continues to be a disaster. It has only generated violence."

His Socialist party ousted the Spanish government yesterday after voters appeared to turn on the party of José María Aznar, the outgoing prime minister, in the wake of last week's suspected al-Qaida attack on Madrid commuter trains and a perceived lack of information on those responsible for it.

The death toll from Thursday's bombs today rose to 201 - one fewer than the October 2002 Bali nightclub attack. More than 1,000 people were wounded in the blasts.

A three-minute silence was today held across Europe to remember the victims.

Mr Zapatero attributed his opponent's defeat to the unpopularity of the Iraq war among Spanish voters, saying it was the "first" consequence. "The second will be that the Spanish troops will come back," he told the radio station.

The prime minister elect - who at present is attempting to form a coalition - said, however, that his first priority was to tackle terrorism "in all its forms".

Mr Aznar's government had blamed the armed Basque separatists Eta for the Madrid train attacks, but suspicion is increasingly falling on al-Qaida or a similar Islamist group.

A video of a man purporting to be al-Qaida's military commander in Europe claiming responsibility for the attack was discovered on the eve of yesterday's election in a Madrid rubbish bin. Abu Dujan al-Afghani, previously unknown to western intelligence agencies, threatened further attacks. "You love life and we love death," he said.

Information on one of the five people so far arrested has emerged as legal papers have linked Jamal Zougam, 30, a Moroccan, to Imad Yarkas, who was jailed for helping to plan the September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

A 700-page indictment by Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon showed that Mr Zougam was under police surveillance and that his home had been searched once, turning up a video of mojahedin fighters in Dagestan, Russia, and telephone numbers of three members of the Madrid al-Qaida cell allegedly led by Yarkas.

Concern has grown across Europe that the bombs could mark the beginning of a terrorist campaign across the continent. The Irish government, which holds the rotating European Union presidency, was today considering calls from France and Germany for high level security talks to look at what new risks the attacks could pose to Europe.

The German interior minister, Otto Schily, said it would "mean a new quality of threat for all of Europe" if al-Qaida was behind the bombing.

The head of Poland's intelligence agency, Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, warned that the country could be a possible target. "We are a United States ally and we have a political and military presence in the Persian gulf [....] We must take it into account that we are not only a hypothetical target but perhaps a real one," he said today in a radio interview.

But Poland, which commands the central zone of Iraq south of Baghdad where Spanish troops are based, said it had no plans to withdraw. It instead offered to extend its command if Spain would not take charge of the 24-nation division from July 1 as planned.

The foreign secretary, Jack Straw, denied that Britain or Spain had put themselves at risk from revenge attacks because of their support of the war in Iraq.

"If al-Qaida is proved to be behind the Madrid bombings there will be some who rush to that conclusion," he told the Financial Times. "But they will be completely wrong. One thing I am clear about is that al-Qaida will go on and would have gone on irrespective of the war in Iraq, until they are firmly stopped."

Mr Aznar had been a prominent supporter of the US-led war in Iraq. A year ago this week he attended a prewar summit with George Bush and Tony Blair in the Azores.