Two U.S. soldiers were shot and seriously wounded Thursday in Kuwait and an American missionary was shot dead in Lebanon, the latest in a spate of attacks that suggest it has become increasingly dangerous to be American in the Arab world.
Authorities said it was too soon to identify a motive in either assault.
Bonnie Penner, 31, of Washington state was the first victim Thursday. She was a nurse and Christian missionary who had studied at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago in the mid-1990s.
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Penner was volunteering at a clinic for the poor in the Lebanese port city of Sidon. As she opened the front door about 8:30 a.m., someone shot her in the head three times.
She was found face down in a pool of blood. Nothing was stolen, and some observers said she could just as well have been targeted for her religion as for being an American because of southern Lebanon’s history of sectarian violence.
In Chicago, her former roommate, Lori Ross, 28, said she knew Penner “wouldn’t have been any other place. She was very committed to Christ and wanted to share her love.”
In Kuwait, where the government is so jittery about attacks on Americans that they have banned residents from nearly a quarter of the nation where the U.S. military operates, the two soldiers were shot by a Kuwaiti traffic police officer who then fled across the border to Saudi Arabia, authorities here said. Officials are working to extradite the suspect.
The officer opened fire about 10:30 a.m. as the soldiers drove from Camp Doha, a U.S. military base, to the town of Arifjan. The soldiers were dressed in desert camouflage and driving a military vehicle, according to a Pentagon spokesman.
One soldier was hit in the face and the other in the shoulder. The soldiers, who did not return fire, managed to drive on to Arifjan, from which they were airlifted to a Kuwaiti military hospital.
U.S. officials did not release the identities of the injured soldiers pending notification of their families. A Pentagon spokesman said their injuries, while serious, did not appear to be life-threatening.
The attack on U.S. servicemen in Kuwait–the third in slightly more than a month–is particularly striking because the Pentagon is relying on the emirate as a launching point for a potential invasion of Iraq.
While Washington has largely dismissed the concerns of regional leaders who caution that they may face trouble controlling public reaction if there is an invasion of Iraq, these incidents suggest those warnings may have merit.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, speaking in the Czech Republic where he was attending a NATO summit, played down the possibly broader significance Thursday, saying the shooting did not necessarily reflect anger with the U.S. buildup of troops in Kuwait in anticipation of a new Iraq war.
“There have been terrorist attacks in that region for my entire adult lifetime, and that’s a long time,” he said.