Swarmer Continues, Brings Backlash

U.S. Military Operation Detains Dozens, Iraqis Question Necessity

(CBS/AP) 
Visiting Baghdad, the British defense secretary, John Reid saw “a greater degree of sectarian violence,” but told reporters he didn't believe civil war was imminent. “The most urgent need at the moment is the speedy formation of a government of national unity,” he said.

In his weekly radio address, noting this weekend's third anniversary of the U.S.-British invasion, President Bush said the Iraqi violence “has created a new sense of urgency” among Iraqi leaders to form such a government.

Those leaders — representatives of the squabbling Shiite Muslim, Sunni Muslim and Kurdish blocs in Iraq's new Parliament — were taking a timeout from intensive all-party negotiations that began last Tuesday, to observe this Monday's major Shiite holiday and Tuesday's Kurdish new year.

They remained deadlocked over how to apportion the most powerful jobs in the new government, as minority factions seek to limit domination by Iraq's Shiite majority.

The security net thrown down by Swarmer, described as the largest Iraq operation by helicopter-borne troops in three years, has angered residents of the area, once a political stronghold for the Sunni-dominated government of Saddam Hussein ousted by the 2003 invasion.

The Iraqi Red Crescent said it sent tents and food to al-Jelam, 15 miles northeast of Samarra, to help people driven from the village by the military operation.

One leading Sunni, Iraqi presidential security adviser Wafiq al-Samaraei, urged that the U.S.-Iraqi operation ease restrictions on traffic across Samarra's vital Tigris River bridge, and cease “disarming the people of Samarra of their own authorized weapons.”

Many Sunni spokesmen differentiate between what they see as an Iraqi nationalist resistance against the U.S. occupation, and Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in Iraq, many foreign, led by people like the Jordanian al Qaeda follower Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi.

“Many young people were detained, some of them innocent, and I call for their quick release,” al-Samaraie told a TV interviewer. But he also called on Samarra's youths “to lay down their arms and join the political process.”

A Sunni leader in Parliament, Tarek al-Hashimi, told reporters the operation came at too delicate a moment in Iraq. “There was no need to escalate military acts as the country is passing through a dangerous political dilemma,” he said Friday.

But Iraq's Shiite interim prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, described the 3-day-old military action as a necessary “pre-emptive operation.”

In other action, Iraqi counter-insurgency troops staged a predawn raid in an area near Baqouba, 27 miles north of Baghdad, touching off a clash in which two gunmen were killed, one was wounded, and 18 were arrested, including a Jordanian, said the army's Brig. Saman al-Talabani.

Along with ammunition and arms, the soldiers seized computer discs of fatwas — edicts — issued by Islamic clerics to kill Iraqi police and soldiers, Talabani said.