Swarmer Continues, Brings Backlash
American and Iraqi forces pushing through a desolate area of Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland rounded up dozens more suspected insurgents, including alleged killers of a television journalist, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Saturday.
The three-day-old sweep through villages 60 miles north of Baghdad – named Operation Swarmer – was prompting growing unease among leading Sunnis. One called it a needless "escalation" at a time of difficult negotiations over Iraq's future government.
U.S. officials have said Swarmer is a sign of how much progress has been made in Iraq because of the participation of the Iraqi army.
Lt. Gen. Pete Chiarelli told CBS News national security correspondent David Martin, "Had we tried to accomplish a mission like this 11 months ago, it would have been primarily U.S. forces."
The Iraqi forces are getting stronger, not only in numbers, but in skills, reports CBS News correspondent Lara Logan.
Captain Jonathan Weikel said that the biggest change he noticed when he returned to Iraq on his second tour was how much the Iraqi security forces had improved.
"I would like them to be farther along than they are, that would be great to feel that way, but it's been good to see the improvement."
Iraqi troops and units of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division detained about 80 suspected insurgents as of Saturday, and released 17 of them after questioning, said Lt. Col. Edward S. Loomis, a 101st Airborne spokesman.
Among those detained were six people, not further identified, allegedly responsible for the killing on March 11 of Amjad Hameed, a journalist for the television network al-Iraqiya, and his driver, the interim Iraqi government said.
In a belated report, the U.S. military said two 101st Airborne Division soldiers were killed on Thursday by indirect fire — usually meaning mortars — at the U.S. Speicher operating base farther north up the Tigris. The deaths, which Loomis said were not directly related to the sweep, were the second and third of division soldiers on the day Operation Swarmer began.
At least 2,314 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war on March 20, 2003.
In other recent developments:
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.