It was not clear if the soldiers were prisoners of war or missing in action, Franks said.
James Kitfield, a reporter embedded with the U.S. Army's V Corps in the Iraqi capital, told CNN that the U.S. Marines found the U.S soldiers alive north of Baghdad.
Officially, the Pentagon lists seven American POWs -- five members of a U.S. Army maintenance convoy that was ambushed March 23 and the pilots of an Apache helicopter that was shot down March 24. Six others are listed as missing in action.
The Marines had been moving north in the direction of Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's ancestral homeland and the last major Iraqi city that is not under coalition control.
The 1st Marine Expeditionary force had been operating in the vicinity of Tikrit, where its mission was to "attack and destroy any type of regime forces in the area," a spokesman for U.S. Central Command said.
CNN Correspondent Brent Sadler, one of the few Western journalists to travel to the immediate outskirts of Tikrit, said the town looked abandoned -- with no military movement and only a few civilians on the road. Highway signs bearing the deposed Iraqi leader's image were still intact.
He spent about 2 1/2 hours touring the outskirts of the town with a photographer, translator and bodyguard, and decided to enter the town after residents assured him there was no fighting there. (Full story)