By MATT MOORE, Associated Press Writer
BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. soldiers and Iraqi police arrested 14 Iraqis, including a militant suspected of leading a terrorist cell made up of followers of the extremist Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam, the military said Thursday.
Sami Ahmed and the others were captured late Wednesday near Baqouba, a hotbed of anti-coalition activity in the Sunni Triangle, north of Baghdad, said Maj. Josslyn Aberle of the Tikrit-based 4th Infantry Division.
Five Iraqi police were wounded in separate attacks in northern Iraq. And a U.S. Army spokesman said a rocket struck the green zone in Baghdad where the headquarters of U.S.-led occupation authority is located after five large explosions rumbled through the center of the capital late Wednesday. No injuries or damage were reported.
A roadside bomb went off as a U.S. military vehicle passed in the town of Hadid, north of Baghdad, wounding a 4th Infantry Division soldier, said Master Sgt. Robert Powell, an Army spokesman. U.S. soldiers arrested one Iraqi in relation to the attack and are searching for a second man who fled the scene on a motorcycle.
Insurgents fired a rocket-propelled grenade at U.S. soldiers guarding a building where U.S. officials were meeting Thursday with city council members in the city of Fallujah, witnesses and police said. The Americans arrested one Iraqi after storming a building from where the insurgents were firing, the witnesses said.
In Ramadi, where nearly 1,000 people rallied to condemn Tuesday's bombings at Shiite shrines, clerics and political leaders raged against the blasts, which threatened to turn Shiites against Sunnis if the bombers were found to have been Iraqi Sunni extremists.
No group claimed responsibility for the attacks, but the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, Gen. John Abizaid, said Wednesday that there was evidence that al-Qaida-linked Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was behind the bombings.
An insurgent group in Fallujah, however, circulated a statement signed by the "Leadership of the Allahu Akbar Mujahedeen" claiming that al-Zarqawi was killed in northern Iraq "during the American bombing there."
The statement did not say when al-Zarqawi was supposedly killed, but U.S. jets bombed strongholds of the extremist Ansar al-Islam in the north last April as Saddam Hussein's regime was collapsing.
"The truth is, al-Qaida is not present in Iraq," the Mujahedeen statement said. Though many Arabs entered the country to fight U.S. troops, only a small number remain, the group said.
A coalition spokesman told The Associated Press the claim of al-Zarqawi's death was patently false.
Separately, insurgents struck an Iraqi police station and a police patrol in and around the northern city of Mosul on Thursday, wounding five policemen, including an officer, according to police and hospital officials.
U.S. and Iraqi officials disagreed over how many people died in Tuesday's bombings in Baghdad and Karbala — the deadliest here since the fall of Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi Governing Council said Wednesday that 271 people were killed. U.S. officials put the toll at 117.
U.S. officials said 15 people were detained in Karbala in the attacks, though none was charged. Among those detained were five Farsi speakers, a suggestion that they were Iranians. About 100,000 Iranians were believed to have come to Iraq for the Ashoura religious rituals, and Iran's news agency said 23 Iranians were among the dead.
"In the meetings held with Iraq's security and police officials in Karbala so far, they have denied (claims) about the complicity of several suspects related to the Islamic Republic in these explosions," Hassan Kazemi Qomi told the Islamic Republic News Agency.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani and other Shiite leaders also accused the coalition of failing to provide adequate security for the worshippers and of not doing enough to prevent extremists from crossing Iraq's porous borders.
In what appeared to be a nod to the criticism, U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer said the coalition would help strengthen border security, saying it was "increasingly apparent" that "a large part of terrorism" comes from outside Iraq.
"There are 8,000 border police on duty today and more are on the way," Bremer said Wednesday. "We are adding hundreds of vehicles and doubling border police staffing in selected areas. The United States has committed $60 million to support border security."
Shiites are believed to comprise about 60 percent of Iraq's 25 million people, and the collapse of Saddam's Sunni-dominated regime has offered them the opportunity to transform their numbers into domination of the government being worked out with the U.S.-led coalition.
By AHMED AL-HAJ, Associated Press Writer
ABYAN, Yemen - Security forces have arrested a leading al-Qaida member in their pursuit of militants in the south Yemeni mountains, security officials said Thursday.
Abdul Raouf Naseeb was one of more than a dozen militants captured Wednesday night in a security force operation in the mountains of Abyan province, 292 miles south of the capital San'a, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Naseeb was sought by Yemeni police and U.S. officials and is believed to have survived the November 2002 attack by a CIA-operated drone that killed al-Qaida's chief agent in Yemen, Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, said the officials. At the time of the attack, Yemeni officials did not say that any al-Qaida operatives had survived.
Naseeb allegedly planned the breakout of 10 militants who escaped from an Aden prison in April 2003, the officials added. The militants had been detained in connection with the suicide attack of the destroyer USS Cole in 2000, which killed 17 American sailors.
Security forces with tanks and helicopters surrounded a group of militants in the mountains late Wednesday. On Thursday, officials told reporters that the area had been cordoned off and the security forces were giving the militants a chance to surrender.
The crackdown came amid reports of planned attacks in Yemen. Security has been noticeably tightened in the capital, San'a, around embassies, foreign companies and government institutions.
On Wednesday, the pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat reported that Sayed Imam el-Sharif, a leading member of Egypt's Islamic Jihad, had been arrested in Yemen. Yemeni officials did not confirm the arrest Thursday.
El-Sharif, founder of the Islamic Jihad, moved to Yemen in 1996 and turned over control of the group to Ayman al-Zawahri, now al-Qaida's No. 2 leader.
Officials say the security forces are searching for Yemeni and Arab fighters, mainly Egyptians and Saudis, who took refuge in Yemen after fighting in Afghanistan alongside Osama bin Laden in the 1980s.
Yemen has allied itself with the U.S. war on terrorism, allowing American forces to enter the country and train its military. The country, which long has tolerated Muslim extremists, is the ancestral homeland of bin Laden.