World

U.S. Hunts Insurgents In Baghdad

March 17, 2004 / 11:57 AM EST / CBS/AP

U.S. and Iraqi military forces launched a big operation in Baghdad to weed out insurgents and capture illegal weapons on Wednesday with troops, helicopters and armored vehicles raiding suspected rebel hideouts.

The campaign comes a day after gunmen killed two Europeans working on a water project. On Monday, assailants shot to death four American missionaries also working on a water project. The six killings suggest the insurgents are going after civilians as a means of undermining reconstruction efforts in Iraq.

The operation launched Wednesday is called "Iron Promise" and is expected to involve thousands of U.S. troops from the Fort Hood, Texas-based 1st Cavalry Division, which has recently arrived in Iraq, and the outgoing Germany-based 1st Armored Division. Scores of Iraqi Civil Defense Corps soldiers are also involved.

In other developments:

Police in Baghdad dismantled more than 100 pounds of highly explosive TNT near the walls of the Italian Embassy, says CBS News Reporter Lisa Barron. It's believed to be the third attempt to attack the embassy and comes as the Italian president is under growing pressure to withdraw his nations 2,700 troops from Iraq.

Unidentified assailants fired mortars late Tuesday that smashed into a house in south Baghdad, killing two Iraqi children, local residents said. Mortars on Tuesday night also hit the U.S. Forward Operating Base Falcon, in south Baghdad, home to the troops involved in Wednesday's raid on the market. There were no casualties, according to U.S. military officials.

Spanish Prime Minister-elect Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero says his incoming government intends to stick by its pledge to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq by the end of June — even though some world leaders have asked Spain to reconsider. In a radio interview, Zapatero calls the occupation of Iraq "a fiasco."

The United Nations is looking into charges that Saddam Hussein made a fortune from the oil-for-food program, which was designed so Iraq could sell some of its oil to buy humanitarian goods and pay reparations to the victims of the 1991 Gulf War.

Former U.N. chief inspector Hans Blix says many lessons can be learned from the Iraq war: One is that weapons inspections are an important tool and may be useful in the future, not only in Iraq but in North Korea.

In Wednesday's first raid, about 250 troops from the armored division's 1st Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment as well as 250 Iraqi soldiers fanned out across the sprawling 20th Street Market, in the city's Al-Bayaa district, which sells everything from vegetables to used car parts.

Some of the stores are suspected of supplying weapons to the rebels, said the raid's commander, Lt. Col. Chuck Williams, 40. He said the market assault was just the start of a citywide crackdown on the guerrillas.

With helicopters hovering overhead, forces in Bradley fighting vehicles and Humvees circled the market to prevent rebels from escaping the area. Troops then went store to store searching for weapons and guerrilla suspects. Few residents expressed opposition to the search and the mood was relaxed.

"There are so many places to run and hide. That's why we have to lock it down. We could easily spend a few days doing this. But we basically just want the bad guys to know that we are still here," said Maj. Gregg Softy, 38, from Hyde Park, N.Y.

U.S. officials say they have identified 14 rebel cells across Baghdad and while raids on them in the past few months have disrupted their operations, they are still active.

A German and a Dutch national were killed in a drive-by shooting near the town of Mussayab, 45 miles south of Baghdad on Tuesday, officials said. Their Iraqi driver and a police officer also were killed, and two police were wounded.

Five Americans missionaries were shot in the northern city of Mosul a day earlier, leaving four dead and one wounded. The Virginia-based Southern Baptist International Mission Board identified the dead missionaries as Larry T. Elliott, 60, and Jean Dover Elliott, 58, of Cary, N.C.; Karen Denise Watson, 38, of Bakersfield, Calif.; and David E. McDonnall, 28, of Rowlett, Texas.

On Tuesday in Mosul, assailants in a car fired on a police vehicle, killing three officers and wounding a fourth, and separately gunmen killed an Iraqi woman working as a translator for the U.S. military.

Mosul was a prime recruiting ground for the officer corps of Saddam's army, and U.S. military officials have described the city as a hotbed of guerrilla activity. The CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have a unit in the city that is searching for so-called "high value" targets in northern Iraq.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said such attacks were an attempt to divide the 36-nation coalition.

Blix returned to U.N. headquarters eight months after he retired as head of the U.N. commission leading the search for Iraq's biological and chemical weapons, promoting his new book "Disarming Iraq" and criticizing the U.S. administration for hyping the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

"Saddam was not a threat to his neighbors," Blix told a news conference Tuesday after signing about 300 books. "He was not a threat to the world. He was a horror to his own people — that was the reality. The spin wanted to make him an immediate threat to the rest of the world. That was an oversell."

The inspectors were ordered out just before the war began last March, but Blix has said he knew by May "that there were no weapons to be found" because the Americans had interrogated many Iraqis and offered reward money for information — with no results.

By contrast, he said, President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair "were genuinely convinced there were weapons of mass destruction." He accused the two leaders of exaggerating the nuclear threat posed by Iraq and misleading the U.S. and British public, but said they were not "deceptive."