World

Troops Target Iraq Rebel Leaders

December 24, 2003 / 6:51 AM EST / CBS/AP

U.S. forces arrested eight rebel suspects in a stronghold of anti-American resistance northwest of Baghdad, the military said Tuesday, as troops tightened security against possible attacks over the Christmas holidays.

Those arrested include an ex-colonel accused of recruiting guerrillas and four suspected associates of fugitive former Vice President Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, who is believed to have a leading role in Iraq's insurgency.

Three soldiers of the U.S.-led coalition died Monday. Two U.S. soldiers and an Iraqi translator were killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad. A Polish soldier died when a fellow soldier's gun fired accidentally in Babylon, south of Baghdad, hours after a visit by Poland's President Aleksander Kwasniewski.

In Mosul, the largest city in northern Iraq, gunmen fatally shot a judge, Youssef Murad, in his car. The assailants escaped.

Also in Mosul, rebels on Tuesday fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a convoy of four U.S. Humvees escorting a cash delivery to a city bank. One soldier was wounded, according to a U.S. soldier at the scene who declined to give his name.

In other developments:

South Korea is planning to send 3,000 troops to join 460 military medics and engineers already in Iraq, media reports from Seoul said Tuesday. That deployment, for nine months from April 1, would make the South Korean contingent the third largest in the 26-nation coalition after the United States and Britain.

Russian President Vladimir Putin told visiting members of Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council that Moscow was ready to write off 65 percent of the $8 billion that Baghdad owes Moscow — Iraq's largest creditor, council member Samir Shaker Mahmoud said after a Kremlin meeting.

The European Union has made its first contribution to a U.N. managed fund for Iraqi reconstruction. It released the equivalent of $9.9 million, part of the $248 million the EU pledged at an international donors conference last October.

When he visited Baghdad in 1984, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was instructed to remind the Iraqis that recent U.S. condemnation of their use of chemical weapons "was made strictly out of our strong opposition" to those weapons, and did not affect the U.S. desire to "continuing to improve bilateral relations with Iraq," according to a briefing document obtained by the nonprofit National Security Archive.

President Bush was given an update on Iraq in a meeting in Washington on Monday with L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator of Iraq, and Rumsfeld.

With the U.S. under "high" terror alert, troops in Iraq are also stepping up precautions. In Baghdad, Brig. Gen. Mark Hertling of the 1st Armored Division said "We have some indications that it would be prudent to take some additional measures to counter specific potential threats."

Both U.S. troops and the insurgents fighting them are adapting their tactics to thwart one another.

In the early days of the guerrilla war, American troops battled groups of insurgents armed with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades.

The rebels were overwhelmed. So they adapted, switching to roadside bombs, hiding them in animal carcasses, sandbags and trash cans. Then the rebels learned U.S. patrol patterns. They launched a recent ambush on one unit by releasing a flock of pigeons to signal the arrival of American vehicles.

"They got smarter, so do we," said Lt. Col. Steven Russell, a battalion commander with the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division. "We've certainly been able to adapt."

Russell said his battalion responded by varying its movements. Soldiers developed a quick, efficient method for dealing with roadside bombs: blasting them with machine gun fire from their Abrams M1-A1 tanks, making the bombs explode harmlessly.

The U.S. military has adjusted to enemy tactics in other ways too.

American tanks and infantry fighting vehicles now patrol villages because their added height gives a better field of vision over villages' low brick walls and squat mud-brick huts. Instead of strafing enemy positions, combat helicopters are mainly used for surveillance and intelligence gathering.

Americans say they have also been using snipers to shoot insurgents who try to hide in a crowd, in an attempt to lessen civilian deaths in firefights.

U.S. commanders also rely heavily on growing intelligence networks involving Iraqi informers and computer databases of suspects. Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, commander of the 4th Infantry, said such tools helped his division track and arrest Saddam Hussein earlier this month.

On Tuesday, a U.S. task force in Baqouba arrested five Iraqis, including one suspected of recruiting guerrillas, Maj. Josselyn Aberle of the 4th Infantry Division told the AP. Two other military sources said the other four were believed to be associates of al-Douri, No. 6 on the U.S. list of 55 most wanted Iraqis. Thirteen fugitives from that list remain at large, with al-Douri at the top.

In an overnight raid in Baqouba, 30 miles northwest of Baghdad, U.S. troops also detained a former Iraqi army colonel suspected of recruiting ex-Iraqi soldiers to fight the U.S. military. Aberle said the ex-colonel was believed to be connected to a local businessman helping to finance the insurgency.

The colonel "is a mid-level in the national scheme, but quite important in the area," the major said.

Another task force in the area arrested two Iraqis discovered digging up a cache of 100 82mm mortar rounds and 20 rockets, Aberle said.

Recent arrests in several towns are partly the result of information gleaned from the arrest of a Saddam on Dec. 13, according to the U.S. military.

Near Kirkuk, Iraqi police arrested five people suspected of attacks on an oil pipeline. Police Col. Jawdet Ali said police also seized 2.2 pounds of explosives in a suspect's house.

A total of 317 U.S. soldiers have been killed as a result of hostile action since the invasion in March. The British military has reported 52 deaths; Italy, 17; Spain, eight; Denmark, Ukraine and Poland have reported one each.