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Sunni clerics call for end to Operation Lightning sweep in Baghdad BAGHDAD, Iraq - An influential Sunni association called for an end to a weeklong counterinsurgency offensive in Baghdad, saying it overwhelmingly targets members of their religious minority and has led to the detention of hundreds of people. Eight people died from insurgent attacks around the country, bringing to at least 830 the number killed since the Shiite-led government took office April 28 - an average of 23 deaths a day, not counting rebels. In the past 18 months, 12,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed, including more than 10,000 Shiites, Interior Minister Bayan Jabr said, citing data from a research center. But he said he figured the affiliations based on the areas where victims lived, not individual religious identifications. Army Col. Mark Milley, who commands the 2nd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, said intelligence indicated insurgents were using Baghdad's southern districts to stage attacks in the capital. U.S. and Iraqi troops swept through several southern neighborhoods Friday. Milley said 84 suspects were detained, while a ''half a dozen suspected al-Qaida cell members'' and several other fighters from Sudan, Syria, Egypt and Jordan had been captured since the operation began Sunday. ''For two years I have been suffering from these terrorists. Now it is my time,'' said Brig. Gen. Mohammed Essa Baher, an Iraqi army commander from the southern district of Mahmoudiya whose two sons had been killed by insurgents. Jabr said the sweep, known as Operation Lightning, had captured 700 suspected insurgents and killed 28 militants. Despite the government gains, violence continued throughout the country. In northern Mosul, a suicide car bomber blew himself up near a police station in the southern part of the city, killing three police officers and wounding five, police Capt. Ahmed Khalil said. A mortar attack in Tal Afar, a city about 50 miles west of Mosul, killed two Iraqi men and injured three, the police chief, Col. Ishmael Mohammed, said. Police also reported finding seven bodies in different parts of the city, identifying them as five terrorists, a police officer and a Kurdistan Democratic Party member. Sunni clerics in Baghdad took advantage of Friday prayer services to call for an end to Operation Lightning, which many Sunnis say target members of their own religious minority. Sunni Arabs are thought to make up the overwhelming majority of the insurgency. ''I appeal to every official here in Iraq to stop humiliating people and [end] the raiding campaign,'' Sheik Mahmoud al-Sumaidie said in the Um al-Qura Mosque, which also serves as the headquarters of the influential Association of Muslim Scholars. Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Shiite, has been trying to include the Sunni minority in the political process, seen as the only way to defuse the insurgency. But the incessant violence - launched by Islamic extremists to Saddam loyalists - highlights what still needs to be done to stop the killings. Among those killed Friday were a city council member in the ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk, an Iraqi contractor in western Samarra and an Iraqi man killed by a mortar outside Baghdad's main hospital. |
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AP: Intelligence Shows Terrorists in Iran Washington (AP) - Mounting evidence gathered over several years has U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies increasingly convinced that leading terror suspects have been living in Iran. Their existence in the Islamic republic poses an ongoing problem to top Bush administration officials, who have warned Middle Eastern countries against providing shelter or other aid to terrorists. The evidence includes communications by a fugitive mastermind of the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing and the capture of a Saudi militant who appeared in a video in which Osama bin Laden confirmed he ordered the Sept. 11 attacks, according to U.S. and foreign officials. They spoke on condition of anonymity because much of the evidence remains classified. Saudi intelligence officers tracked and apprehended Khaled bin Ouda bin Mohammed al-Harbi last year in eastern Iran, officials said. The arrest came nearly three years after the cleric had appeared with bin Laden and discussed details of the Sept. 11 planning during a dinner that was videotaped and aired across the world. The capture was a coup for Saudi Arabia, which spent months tracking him and setting up the intelligence operation that led to his being taken into custody in exchange for eventual amnesty. The officials said interrogations of al-Harbi, who is now in Saudi Arabia, have yielded confirmation of many al-Qaida tactics, including how members crossed into Iran after the U.S. began military operations to rout al-Qaida and the Taliban from Afghanistan. Al-Harbi is believed to have been paralyzed from the waist down while fighting in the 1990s alongside Muslim extremists in Bosnia and Afghanistan, and he surprised intelligence officials when he appeared in the December 2001 video with bin Laden. "Everybody praises what you did," al-Harbi said on the tape. U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies also have evidence stretching back to the late 1990s that indicates Ahmad Ibrahim al-Mughassil remains in hiding in Iran. He is wanted as one of the masterminds of the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 Americans. Al-Mughassil, who also goes by the alias Abu Omran, has been charged as a fugitive by the United States - accused of conspiracy to commit murder in the attacks - and has a $5 million bounty on his head. U.S. authorities have long alleged that the 1996 bombing was carried out by a Saudi wing of the militant group Hezbollah, which receives support from Iran and Syria. Intelligence agencies gathered evidence, including a specific phone number, as early as 1997 indicating that al-Mughassil was living in Iran, and they have other information indicating his whereabouts. U.S. officials have not publicly discussed the Saudi capture of al-Harbi or their evidence on al-Mughassil's whereabouts, but they have increasingly raised questions about Iran's efforts to turn over other suspected terrorists believed to be under some form of loose house arrest. Nicholas Burns, State Department undersecretary for political affairs, told Congress last month that Iran has refused to identify al-Qaida members it has in custody. "Iran continues to hold senior al-Qaida leaders who are wanted for murdering Americans and others in the 1998 East Africa Embassy bombings and for plotting to kill countless others," Burns said. Top administration officials have repeatedly warned Iran against harboring or assisting suspected terrorists. U.S. intelligence this week has been checking some reports, still uncorroborated as of Friday, that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaida's leader of the Iraqi insurgency, may have dipped into Iran, officials said. On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld warned countries in the Middle East not to help al-Zarqawi. "Were a neighboring country to take him in and provide medical assistance or haven for him, they, obviously, would be associating themselves with a major linkage in the al-Qaida network and a person who has a great deal of blood on his hands," Rumsfeld said. The U.S. and foreign officials said evidence gathered by intelligence agencies indicates the following figures are somewhere in Iran, perhaps under some form of house arrest or surveillance: _Saad bin Laden, the son of the al-Qaida leader whom U.S. authorities have aggressively hunted since the Sept. 11 attacks. _Saif al-Adel, an al-Qaida security chief wanted in connection with the deadly 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa. _Suleiman Abu Ghaith, the chief of information for al-Qaida and a frequently quoted spokesman for bin Laden. Kenneth Katzman, a Middle East analyst at the Congressional Research Service, said it's possible that some of the suspected terrorists are being held in guarded villas, and he doubted any detention is uncomfortable. "I think that Iran sees these guys as something of an insurance policy," Katzman said. "It's leverage." Rasool Nafisi, a Middle East analyst who studies conservative groups in Iran, said Iran has returned some lower-level operatives to their home countries but probably is keeping higher-ranking operatives as a bartering chip. "Remember, Islamic tradition is very much based on haggling," Nafisi said. "If I were the Iranian government, I'd be very happy to have them and to use them in future negotiations with the United States." |
Ironic smile...well of course nw they want Operation Lightning to end.