World

Iraqis Optimistic Reporter Is Alive

February 28, 2006 / 7:23 AM EST / CBS/AP

Iraqi officials believe kidnapped American journalist Jill Carroll is alive and they are optimistic about her release.

Iraq's interior minister said Monday that he believes Carroll is alive and will be released, even though the Sunday deadline set by her kidnappers had passed.

Interior Minister Bayan Jabr also said he knew who abducted the 28-year-old journalist last month.

"We know his name and address, and we are following up on him as well as the Americans," he told ABC News. "I think she is still alive."

Meanwhile, sectarian violence appeared to be receding throughout the country and Sunni Arabs signaled they may be ready to return to talks to form a new Iraqi government.

In other developments:

Acting on a tip from residents, Interior Ministry forces captured a top aide to al Qaeda Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi during a raid in western Iraq, a security official said Monday. The official, a member of the ministry's counterinsurgency Wolf Brigade, identified the key al Qaeda figure as Abu al-Farouq, who was previously unknown. The officer said al-Farouq and five other al Qaeda operatives were captured based on a tip from residents near al-Bakr, about 30 miles west of the insurgent stronghold of Ramadi.

Saddam Hussein has ended his hunger strike for health reasons. His lawyers said he has lost weight but won't say how much. Saddam stopped eating 11 days ago to protest his mass murder trial in Baghdad.

There was some violence Monday but it looks more like a return to Iraq's everyday insurgent violence, and not the Shi'ite-on-Sunni tension that had briefly turned neighbor against neighbor, CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier reports. A car bomb exploded in Baghdad's Shula neighborhood, killing four people, and a mortar landed in the International Zone, where most of the foreign embassies are located. But the curfew across this city has been lifted, traffic is heavy, and it looks like the worst of the crisis is past.

The German government on Monday denied a New York Times report that its intelligence service passed information about Saddam Hussein's plan for defending Baghdad to the United States a month before the U.S.-led invasion.

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, also said Monday that he believed Carroll was alive.

"I have discussed the issue with the interior minister," Khalilzad said Monday. "She clearly is in a dangerous situation, but we're working hard with the Iraqis and others to get her released."

All the attention focused on the mob violence here may actually be good for Carroll's case because the abductors want maximum publicity, and they know they're not going to get that right now, reports Dozier.

Carroll, a freelancer working for the Christian Science Monitor, was abducted Jan. 7 in Baghdad and was last seen on a videotape broadcast Feb. 10 by a Kuwaiti television station, Al-Rai. The station said the kidnappers threatened to kill her unless the United States met unspecified demands by Sunday.

The four people killed in the Monday mortar attack died when several shells exploded near the Nasir Market in the mostly Shiite Shula area of western Baghdad, police said.

The city was otherwise generally peaceful Monday – the first day without extended curfews or a ban on private vehicles since the bombing of a Shiite shrine triggered attacks against Sunni mosques in Baghdad, Basra and elsewhere and pushed the nation to the brink of civil war.

Four bodies – blindfolded and handcuffed – were found Monday in Dora, a Baghdad neighborhood where a mortar barrage the night before killed 16 people and wounded 53. Two Iraqi soldiers were wounded in an ambush Monday in Mahmoudiya, about 20 miles south of the capital, officials said.

The U.S. military said an American soldier had died from non-combat related injuries suffered Friday north of Baghdad. The statement did not elaborate. Three soldiers were killed Sunday in combat operations in the capital.

Their deaths brought to at least 2,291 the number of members of the U.S. military who have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The figure includes seven military civilians.

Elsewhere, 14 suspected insurgents were arrested late Sunday in Diyala province, a religiously mixed area which was also placed under expanded curfew last week. An Iraqi army statement said troops found rockets, hand grenades and bomb making materials in the raids.

Gunmen killed two youths playing soccer in the Diyala provincial capital and wounded five in an attack Sunday. Thirteen members of a Shiite family were massacred in Diyala last week.

The Sunnis walked out of the talks on forming a new government Thursday. The walkout threatened U.S. plans to establish a unity government capable of luring Sunnis away from the insurgency so U.S. and other international troops can begin heading home.

Adnan al-Dulaimi, whose Iraqi Accordance Front spearheaded the Sunni boycott, said the Sunnis have not decided to return to the talks but are "intent on participating" in a new government.

"The situation is tense and within the next two days, we expect the situation to improve and then we will have talks," he told The Associated Press. "We haven't ended our suspension completely but we are on the way to end it."

He cited "some conditions" that must be met first, chief among them the return of mosques still occupied by Shiite militants in Baghdad and Salman Pak. Al-Dulaimi did not mention the other demands, but some Sunni politicians have insisted on replacing Shiite police with Sunni soldiers in heavily Sunni areas.

Although sectarian violence has receded since the attacks last week, tensions remain high between majority Shiites and the minority Sunnis.

More than 60 Shiite families fled their homes in predominantly Sunni areas west and north of Baghdad after receiving threats, said Shiite legislator Jalaladin al-Saghir and Iraqi army Brig. Gen. Jalil Khallaf.

Sunni and Shiite religious leaders have called for unity and an end to attacks on each other's mosques.

Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose own militia was blamed for many of the attacks on Sunnis, repeated the appeal Sunday when he addressed followers in the southern Shiite stronghold of Basra upon his return from neighboring Iran.

He accused Americans and their coalition partners of stirring up sectarian unrest and demanded their withdrawal.