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U.S. Presses Hunt For Iraq Rebels

The U.S. pressed its hunt for Iraqi insurgents Wednesday with a major raid in a flashpoint Sunni city, as the top military official in Iraq warned the road to peace would be long and difficult.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, tells CBS News that he expects the anti-American insurgency to continue.

"We've got to move towards reconstruction and reconciliation and get all the people in the country involved in the political processes and in participation in this democratic idea that we have for the country," Sanchez said. "That's what's important and at some point we'll get the violence to abate."

Hoping to accelerate that process, U.S. forces launched a major sweep dubbed Operation Ivy Blizzard in the town of Samarra, where U.S. troops arrested 79 guerillas on Tuesday and killed 11 attackers the day before.

"Samarra has been a little bit of a thorn in our side," said U.S. Army Col. Nate Sassaman. "It hasn't come along as quickly as other cities in the rebuilding of Iraq. This operation is designed to bring them up to speed."

Backed by armored vehicles and Apache helicopters, U.S. troops conducted door-to-door searches and detained a dozen people in the predominantly Sunni town of 200,000 people.

In a poor neighborhood of southwestern Baghdad, an explosives-laden truck speeding toward a police station slammed into a bus and blew up before dawn, killing at least 10 Iraqis. While an Iraqi official initially reported the blast as an attack, U.S. military officials later concluded it was an accident.

In other developments:

The coalition scored a major victory Saturday by nabbing Saddam, who Iraqi officials revealed Wednesday was being held in the Baghdad area. But violence has continued in the capital and in predominantly Sunni areas west and north of Baghdad, once Saddam's power base. In the northern city of Mosul, assailants shot and killed a policeman Wednesday, police said. And Iraqi security forces there opened fire on pro-Saddam protesters, injuring nine, witnesses said.

A document found with Saddam when he was captured provides a detailed description of the Iraqi insurgence, The Washington Post reports, and has led to the arrest of three Iraqi generals. The material shows Saddam to have been an inspiration to the fighters rather than an operational commander.

In a CBS News/New York Times poll conducted after Saddam's arrest, 65 percent of Americans now say U.S. efforts to bring stability to Iraq are going well, up from 47 percent before his capture. However, few Americans believe the war is over and just one in four said they think there will be fewer attacks on U.S. troops.

The U.S. military is holding Saddam in the Baghdad area, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council said Wednesday. President Bush, in an interview with ABC, said Saddam deserved the "ultimate penalty" but it would be up to the people of Iraq to decide whether he should be executed.

Former Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz has started calling his youngest son — named Saddam — by the name Zuhair instead, according to letters obtained by a London-based Arabic newspaper.

The Pentagon has delayed meeting with companies hoping to win $18.6 billion in Iraq rebuilding contracts, The Wall Street Journal reports, amid internal differences over how to award the deals.

Meanwhile, Iraq's foreign minister appealed to the United Nations for help in establishing a democratic government and urged that it return its staff quickly to his country.

But Hoshyar Zebari, who criticized the United Nations for not helping topple Saddam, received no promise Tuesday that the world body's staff would go back soon.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan pulled all U.N. international staff out of Iraq in October after a series of attacks on humanitarian organizations.

Zebari urged the United Nations to put aside differences over the war in Iraq and not let his country down again after failing to endorse the military effort to topple Saddam's "murderous tyranny."

Iraq needs the world body now because it is "the key forum for collective international action to help us achieve our goals of restructuring and democratizing our country," he said.

"Settling scores with the United States should not be at the cost of helping to bring stability to the Iraqi people," Zebari said.

Annan presented the Security Council with a report — issued last week — in which he said Iraq remained too dangerous to reopen the Baghdad U.N. office. Instead, he said, the world body would open an Iraq office in Nicosia, Cyprus, and an annex in Amman, Jordan, with staff traveling to Iraq as needed.

Elsewhere, Mr. Bush's envoy to Iraq met Wednesday with Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi — a staunch U.S. ally on Iraqi policy — seeking Italian assurances to help relieve Baghdad's huge debt burden. Former Secretary of State James A. Baker III was upbeat after winning agreement from Germany and France.

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