World

GIs Keep Pressure On Insurgents

May 14, 2005 / 1:06 PM EDT / CBS/AP

American fighter jets flattened a suspected insurgent safe house near the Syrian border, the U.S. military said Friday, as hundreds of U.S. troops searched remote desert villages house by house for followers of Iraq's most wanted militant leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

American forces have met little resistance since the first two days of Operation Matador, aimed at clearing a region believed to be a haven for foreign fighters slipping over the border from Syria, the military said in a statement Friday. American intelligence indicates the insurgents are either in hiding or have fled the region, U.S. Capt. Jeffrey Pool said in the statement.

Villagers reached by telephone Friday said gunmen still roamed some areas and they continued to receive U.S. shelling.

The U.S. offensive — one of the largest since militants were forces from Fallujah six months ago — comes amid a surge of militant attacks that have killed more than 420 people in just over two weeks since Iraq's first democratically elected government was announced.

In other developments:

Soldiers across Iraq have voiced frustration to the Washington Post over limits on women in combat that they say make no sense in an insurgency with no front lines. The dozens of soldiers of both sexes, from lower enlisted ranks to senior officers, said the policy should be changed to allow mixed-sex support units to be assigned to combat battalions. Many favored allowing qualified women to join the infantry. However, a House subcommittee seeking to keep women out of combat passed a measure this week that would ban women from thousands of Army positions.

At the Pentagon, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, indicated Thursday that the insurgency could last for many more years. "This requires patience," he said at a news conference Thursday. "This is a thinking and adapting adversary ... I wouldn't look for results tomorrow. One thing we know about insurgencies, that they last from three, four years to nine years."

Australia's top Islamic leader met with clerics in Baghdad on Thursday to appeal for the release of Australian hostage Douglas Wood. Sheik Taj El Din al-Hilaly told reporters he had made no contact yet with Woods' captors, but said he was ready to negotiate with anyone. There has been no word of Wood's fate since his kidnappers' deadline for Australia to start withdrawing its forces from Iraq passed Monday. More than 200 foreigners have been kidnapped in Iraq since Saddam Hussein's regime collapsed in April 2003. More than 30 have been killed by their captors.

Japan's foreign minister went on the Arabic Al-Jazeera TV network on Friday to try to win the freedom of a Japanese security worker who militants in Iraq are believed to be holding hostage. The Ansar al-Sunnah Army claimed on its Web site Monday that it ambushed a group of five foreign contractors in Iraq and killed four of them. The fifth one — Japanese citizen Akihito Saito, 44 — was seriously injured and had been taken hostage, they said. Tokyo has been unable to learn any more about Saito's whereabouts or condition.

A car bomb exploded in a jammed commercial district of the capital Thursday, setting cars, shops and restaurants ablaze in the most deadly of a string of attacks that killed 21 and injured more than 90. Iraqis expressed growing fury at the relentless bloodshed, throwing stones at police and U.S. forces who responded to the bombing that killed 17 Iraqis and injured 81.

Two more blasts rocked the capital Friday, both targeting American patrols, Iraqi police said. There were no immediate reports of casualties, but Associated Press Television News footage of the blasts showed a U.S. Humvee, its hood open, consumed by flames on a highway leading to the airport.

In western Baghdad, snipers opened fire on the motorcade of the Interior Ministry's undersecretary Maj. Gen. Hikmat Moussa Hussein, killing one of his guards and wounding three, police Maj. Moussa Abdul Karim said. Hussein escaped unharmed.

North of the capital, a car bomb exploded Friday as an Iraqi army patrol was moving through Baqouba, killing three people and wounding six, police Col. Mudhafar Mohammed said. The dead included two soldiers and a civilian, he said.

The U.S. military said information gained from a "senior terrorist" captured during the operation near the Syrian border led Marines to the safe house Thursday in Karabilah, a village about 200 miles northwest of Baghdad.

As Marines approached, at least four gunmen fired on them from the building, the military statement said. U.S. F-18 Super Hornet jets destroyed the building with a combination of bombs and rockets, the statement said.

The offensive was launched after U.S. intelligence showed large numbers of insurgents had moved into the northern Jazirah Desert following losses in Fallujah and Ramadi, further east. The area is believed to be a staging ground for foreign fighters, who receive weapons and equipment there to launch attacks in Iraq's main cities.

The U.S. military has confirmed five Marine deaths so far and says about 100 insurgents have been killed in the operation. But a Washington Post reporter embedded with U.S. forces put the American death toll Thursday at seven — six of them from one squad.

Gunmen were taking over the homes of Iraqi citizens to evade Marines in the area, the U.S. military said Friday.

Residents reached by telephone in Saadah said American forces were periodically shelling their village Friday.

"The situation is very bad ... Most of the people have fled to the desert," said Samran Mukhlef Abed, a tribal leader. "The Americans are all around ... and medical services do not exist here. If someone is hurt, we have to take him to cities that are far way from here and that is impossible with the situation."

The U.S. military denied resident reports that some areas have been without electricity and running water since the offensive began late Saturday, but said regional hospital services were disrupted when a suicide car bomber attacked the hospital in Haditha, 140 miles northwest of Baghdad, on Saturday.

The U.S. military said it was receiving intelligence from local residents, fed up with the presence of foreign fighters in the region. But residents voiced equal frustration with U.S. forces, who pounded the area with airstrikes, artillery barrages and gunfire during the first days of the offensive

"They destroyed our city, killed our children, destroyed our houses. We have nothing left," one man told Associated Press Television News in Qaim on Thursday. He did not give his name and hid his face with a scarf to address the camera.

Families were fleeing in trucks packed with luggage and APTN footage showed plumes of smoke rising from the town.

On the outskirts of Qaim, where the offensive began Saturday, a group of masked gunmen armed with machine guns, remained defiant Thursday.

"We will fight whoever comes, whether they are American or Arab," one of them told APTN.

U.S. and Iraqi forces have conducted stepped up raids across the country in recent weeks. Iraq's government announced Thursday the capture of two more wanted insurgents — one a bomb maker with links to al-Zarqawi identified as Seif-Eddine Mustafa al-Naimi, the other a financier for an insurgent group linked to al Qaeda in Iraq identified as Amar Farid Abdul-Qader Ashur al-Jibouri.

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