World

Another 'Most Wanted' Under Wraps

By Joel Roberts

April 17, 2003 / 10:36 AM EDT / CBS

U.S. troops continued Thursday to fight urban unrest and ferret out leaders of Saddam Hussein's crumble regime, nabbing another figure on the list of 55 wanted Iraqis.

Special forces captured Saddam's half-brother, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, in a nighttime raid in Baghdad that resulted in no casualties, Central Command reported. He is the five of clubs in the deck of cards used by CENTCOM to publicize the fugitive leaders' names and faces.

Meanwhile, warnings from U.S. commanders that troops' work in Iraq was not done — despite the end of major combat — were bolstered by reports of clashes in three large Iraqi cities, some deadly.

In Mosul, the largest city in the north, U.S. commanders tried to ease anti-American anger after two days of confrontations involving U.S. Marines. Local hospital officials say 17 Iraqis died and at least 17 others were injured in the clashes.

A Marine unit in Baghdad killed a looter. And Marines in Tikrit had to separate people seeking food at a warehouse from Saddam supporters who attacked them.

In other developments:

Secretary of State Colin Powell says he's going to Syria for talks. Powell says Syria, a wartime ally of Iraq, should expel Iraqi officials who managed to escape across the border.

The U.S. has bombed Iraqi bases of a group opposed to the Iranian government. General Richard Myers says U.S. forces are pursuing fighters from the Mujahedeen Khalq who are still inside Iraq. The group is on the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations.

President Bush urged the United Nations to lift sanctions that have choked Iraq's economy for nearly 13 years. Debate on the issue could be divisive; some Security Council members may insist on getting detailed assurances of what the U.N.'s future role in Iraq will be before agreeing to lift the sanctions.

The European Union, at a summit Thursday in Greece, said the U.N. must play a central role in rebuilding Iraq. Bush administration officials have suggested the U.N. could take the lead in humanitarian efforts, but they want the United States and Britain to control the political and economic reconstruction of Iraq.

Gen. Tommy Franks briefed the president direct from one of Saddam's bombed-out palaces on the outskirts of Baghdad. At the Pentagon, Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal said Franks probably would move some sort of military headquarters operation into Iraq soon, though he did not specify if it would be in Baghdad.

Koichiro Matsuura, director-general of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, said Thursday that the U.N. should impose a temporary embargo on Iraqi cultural objects to curtail the sale of any of the pillaged items.

More aid is making its way into Iraq. At least 60 trucks have left neighboring Jordan carrying flour and medical supplies.

The U.S. military said Wednesday that 125 U.S. service members have died and three are missing. The British government says 31 British soldiers have died.

At a military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, the seven U.S. prisoners of war freed in Iraq earlier this week were examined Thursday by military doctors, who said they were in good health.

The U.S. Central Command, while acknowledging a gunbattle on Tuesday that killed about seven Iraqis in Mosul, had no immediate comment on a second day of violence reported Wednesday by Mosul residents and hospital personnel.

Hospitals said 14 people died Tuesday. Three more Iraqis were reported fatally shot Wednesday and 17 wounded.

"They are killing us and no one's talking about it," Zahra Yassin said at a hospital with her wounded son. "We want Saddam back. At least there was security."

In Kirkuk, the second-largest city in the north, Arab families complained that they have been forced out their homes by a group of Kurds claiming ownership in the largely Kurdish city.

Kurds have long vowed to return to their lost lands and homes once the city was freed. They claim the land was theirs before Saddam evicted them in the 1980s.

Kurdish leaders have sought to assure the United States and Arab countries that the process of return would be a lawful one. But the new Kurdish occupants took over in the confusion immediately after the April 10 collapse of Saddam's authority in Kirkuk.

In Baghdad, U.S. troops broadened their efforts to restore law and order in a city plagued by widespread looting since Saddam's regime collapsed.

Besides the Marine unit that killed the looter, another group of Marines went to a looted branch of the al-Rashid bank on Thursday, and removed remaining stacks of cash for safekeeping elsewhere.

Some of the worst looting targeted Iraq's top museums and the National Library, ravaging irreplaceable Babylonian, Sumerian and Assyrian collections that chronicled ancient civilization in Mesopotamia.

After the capture of Achille Lauro mastermind Abu Abbas, CBS News Correspondent Jim Stewart reports U.S. forces are seeking several suspected terrorists in Iraq.

The suspects include Abdul Yasin, linked to the World Trade Center attack in 1993 and jailed in Baghdad; Ahmad Khlil Al-Ani, an Iraqi intelligence official who, according to unconfirmed reports, may have met 9-11 hijacker Mohammed Atta in Prague in April 2001; Abu Zaqawi, an al Qaeda lieutenant who lost a leg fighting in Afghanistan and got treatment in Baghdad; and Farouk Hijazi an Iraqi ambassador tied to a 1993 assassination attempt against former President George H.W. Bush. Hijazi may have escaped to Syria by now.

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