U.S. Troops Search For GI Missing In Iraq

U.S. forces were conducting an urgent search in central Baghdad Tuesday for an American Army soldier feared kidnapped.

Troops carrying photos of the missing soldier continued door-to-door searches in the central Karradah district, which had been sealed off Monday night, while Army Kiowa reconnaissance helicopters circled overhead.

The missing soldier's name and other personal details have not been officially released, although American troops who raided Baghdad's al-Furat TV on Monday said they were looking for an abducted American officer of Iraqi descent who had gone to visit family members in Karradah.

Few American soldiers have been kidnapped by insurgents in Iraq, due largely to strict military procedures for those on patrol or at checkpoints.

The U.S. military has strict rules for soldiers operating outside their bases, designed to ensure they are under supervision and also to protect them. All soldiers leaving their bases are supposed to be accompanied by a noncommissioned officer and travel in at least two vehicles.

"It's very strange that anyone would let this individual go, but he went, and now we're looking for him," CBS News military analyst Col. Mitch Mitchell (Ret.) said on CBS News' The Early Show.

"We have not heard anything," Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, an American spokesman in Baghdad, said Tuesday. "We are sure U.S. forces are doing everything they can in the search."

Mitchell added that beside the possibility of a catastrophic outcome for the missing individual, such an incident diverts the attention of the entire U.S. military apparatus in Baghdad from its mission as they swing into search mode.

CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan says Baghdad is where the war in Iraq will be won or lost, but the U.S. definition of victory has changed from defeating the insurgency, to reducing daily violence to a level that enables a full handover to Iraqi forces.

"A clear military victory in Iraq is no longer an achievable goal," Logan reports. The goal of reducing violence around Baghdad, meanwhile, is also proving elusive.

One U.S. soldier on patrol around Baghdad told Logan, "I'm fighting for, supposedly, the freedom of the Iraqi people, but to be honest with you, I'm over here fighting to keep the people I came over here with alive."

Logan says the non-stop bloodshed in the capital is being met with increasing impatience by weary Iraqis who are fed up with the failure of the United States and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government to stop or even slow the attacks.

Meanwhile, the American military announced that two more U.S. Marines were killed during combat in the insurgent stronghold of Anbar province.

The deaths raised to 89 the number of U.S. forces killed in October, the highest toll for any month this year and on course to surpass the October 2005 total of 96. Before that the deadliest months were January 2005, at 107; November 2004 at 137 and April 2004, at 135.

At least 2,799 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The figure includes seven military civilians. At least 2,236 died as a result of hostile action, according to the military's numbers.

Mitchell told The Early Show the problem U.S. troops in Iraq, and Baghdad in particular, face is that American military policy has been "trying to deal with the symptoms, responding to violence, not looking at the root cause."

He says there simply aren't enough forces — 60,000 in the capital, including both U.S. and Iraqi — to quell the violence. Mitchell says the security situation demands "overwhelming force, and we don't have that in Iraq right now."

Speaking Tuesday at a rare joint news conference with the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in the country, said Iraqi forces should be able to take full control of security within the next 12 to 18 months with minimal American support.

Regardless, he said he would not hesitate to ask for more troops if he felt they were necessary.

At least two more Iraqi policemen were fatally shot early Tuesday in the southern city of Amarah, where militiamen loyal to an anti-American cleric have been hunting down officers aligned with a rival group in a new outbreak of Shiite-on-Shiite revenge attacks.

Police captain Hussein Salih Hassan was killed Tuesday in a pre-dawn gunbattle with attackers who forced their way into his home, Ali Challoub, an administrator at Amarah's al-Sadr Public hospital, said. A noncommissioned officer, Ala' Ghlayyim Zned was killed in his home by machine gun-toting attackers at around the same time, Challoub said.

The latest killings in Amarah follow the murders of four policemen on Monday, which were blamed on fighters of the Mahdi Army headed by hardline anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Those forces appeared to have control of the southern city's streets after the police force dominated by the rival Badr Brigades fled.

Although the Iraqi army set up a few roadblocks, troops did not seek to block Mahdi fighters.

The spread of revenge killings among Shiites in their southern heartland poses a new challenge for the Iraqi government and American forces struggling to control insurgent and sectarian bloodshed to the north - especially in Baghdad. It also bodes ill for greater political progress; both al-Sadr's party and the sponsors of the Badr Brigades, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI, are members of the ruling Shiite coalition.

As Logan points out, the most powerful parties in the Iraqi government also control the deadliest militias, and there is very little trust among regular Iraqis in their own national security forces.

The violence, and the apparent lack of a solution, is bringing pressure down hard on the governments of the United States and its lead ally in Iraq, the United Kingdom, to get troops out of the war-torn country.

That pressure, Logan says, is exactly the result the Iraqi insurgency has been trying to elicit, their most effective weapon against the coalition forces. Those fighters, she adds, "they're not going anywhere."