Italy to salute more slain soldiers

State funerals for victims of attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan

Two Italian soldiers were killed in Afghanistan on May 5 by a bomb that exploded as their patrol vehicle travelled along a road southeast of Kabul.
The two servicemen, identified as Lieutenant Manuel Fiorito and Staff Sergeant Luca Polsinelli, died of their wounds after being airlifted to a nearby military hospital. Four other soldiers were slightly injured by the blast.
It was not immediately clear whether the bomb was a mine or a home-made bomb detonated by remote control when the two Italian Puma armoured cars passed by.
The attack came less than a month after a suicide bomber blew himself up outside the base used by Italy's provisional reconstruction team in the northwestern city of Herat. That attack caused three Afghan deaths.
The bodies of Fiorito, 27, and Polsinelli, 29, were flown back to Italy last Sunday. On Monday afternoon their two coffins were placed in ceremonial rooms at Rome's Celio military hospital so that friends, family and the public could pay their respects.
State funerals for the two soldiers of the Alpini mountain regiment were held on Tuesday in Rome.
The funerals came exactly a week after those of three Carabinieri policemen who were killed by another roadside bomb in Nassiriya, Iraq, on April 27.
That attack also seriously injured a fourth Carabiniere, Enrico Frassanito, who died last Sunday after ten days in hospital. Frassanito, who suffered burns over half of his body, had appeared to be improving and so he was flown from Iraq to Verona, his home town in northern Italy. But during the journey his condition took a sudden downturn and he died in Verona hospital about an hour after arriving.
A state funeral for the Carabiniere was also held on Tuesday in Verona.
Intelligence sources said that the attacks in Afghanistan and in Nassiriya cannot be considered a coincidence given the recent elections in Italy.
They amount to "pressure on the new centre-left government to withdraw (Italian) military contingents," the sources said.
Premier-elect Romano Prodi has already said he will pull troops out of Iraq by the end of the year, as had been decided by the previous centre-right government of Silvio Berlusconi.
In the wake of the recent attack in Nassiriya, some of Prodi's more leftwing allies have called for a pull-out by the summer. After the May 5 blast in Afghanistan there were calls for a withdrawal from that country too.
Prodi expressed his deep "sorrow" over the recent deaths but gave no clear signal on his intentions regarding the peace-keeping force.
"The problem of the price paid by our soldiers for peace and stability is one of the country's biggest problems at the moment, possibly the biggest," he said.
Asked about the possibility that the attacks were designed to make him pull troops out of Afghanistan, he said: "Afghanistan is a problem that I raised many months ago because the security situation there is very serious."
Prodi has so far given grudging backing to the Italian presence there. On March 26, he was quoted as saying: "We're in Afghanistan on an international mandate. We have to stay. But the political situation is terrible. We have to think very hard." Italy has some 1,400 soldiers stationed in Afghanistan. About a thousand are in Kabul, where they are part of the ISAF international security assistance force, and the rest in Herat, where Italy's provincial reconstruction team is based.
Friday's two victims took the number of Italian soldiers killed in Afghanistan since the start of the mission to five.
Italian troops in Iraq currently number about 2,600. Italy did not take part in the US-led invasion in 2003 but sent a contingent afterwards to help with peacekeeping and reconstruction.

Publication Date: 2006-05-14
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=6243