United States and Iraqi forces killed the second most powerful figure in the al-Qaeda in Iraq organisation in a weekend raid in Baghdad, the US military and Iraqi officials said on Tuesday, claiming to have struck a blow to the country’s most feared insurgent group.
Abdullah Abu Azzam led al-Qaeda’s operations in Baghdad, planning a brutal wave of suicide bombings that hit the capital since April this year, killing hundreds of people, officials said.
He also controlled the finances for foreign fighters that flowed into Iraq to join the insurgency.
Abu Azzam, who an Iraqi government spokesperson said was an Iraqi, was the top deputy to the group’s leader, Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Abu Azzam was on a list of Iraq’s 29 most wanted insurgents issued by the US military in February and had a bounty of $50 000 on his head.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq denied that Abu Azzam was the number two leader of the organisation and said ”it was not confirmed” that he had been killed.
”Abu Azzam was one of al-Qaeda’s many soldiers and is the leader of one of its battalions operating in Baghdad,” the group said in an internet statement signed by its spokesperson Abu Maysara al-Iraqi.
It called the US and Iraqi claims that he was the group’s top deputy ”a futile attempt … to raise the morale of their troops”.
Elsewhere, police on Tuesday found the bodies of 22 Iraqi men who had been shot to death in southern Iraq, and a suicide bomber attacked Iraqis applying for jobs as policemen in a city north of Baghdad, killing nine and wounding 21.
The US military announced that a marine was killed a day earlier by a roadside bomb in the town of Khaldiyah, west of Baghdad. The death brought to 1 918 the number of US service members who have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
It was not immediately clear what effect Abu Azzam’s death would have on al-Qaeda in Iraq, which has been one of the deadliest militant groups, carrying out suicide attacks targeting in particular the country’s Shi’ite majority.
The US military has claimed to have killed or captured leading al-Zarqawi aides in the past and attacks have continued unabated — though Abu Azzam appeared to be a more significant figure.
Iraqi government spokesperson Laith Kubba called the killing of Abu Azzam a ”painful blow” to al-Qaeda, but warned that the group would likely carry out revenge attacks.
Abu Azzam was killed early on Sunday when US and Iraqi forces raided a high-rise apartment building in Baghdad, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Boylan, a US military spokesperson, told The Associated Press. ”They went in to capture him, he did not surrender and he was killed in the raid,” Boylan said.
The Iraqi and US forces targeted the building after a tip from an Iraqi citizen, Kubba said. During the raid, the troops captured another militant in the apartment with Abu Azzam, Kubba said.
Abu Azzam — whose real name is Abdullah Najim Abdullah Mohamed Al-Jawari — was the number two figure in al-Qaeda in Iraq, Kubba and Boylan said.
He had claimed responsibility for the assassinations of a number of top politicians, including a car bomb in May 2004 that killed Izzadine Saleem, the president of the US-appointed governing council, and a July 2004 attack that killed the governor of Nineveh province, the military said.
He was the group’s ”amir” or leader in Anbar, the vast western province that is the heartland of the insurgency, until spring 2005, when he became the amir in Baghdad and led operations in and around the capital. He was ”responsible for the recent upsurge in violent attacks in the city since April 2005,” the military said in
a statement.
”We continue to decimate the leadership of the al-Qaeda in Iraq terrorist network and continue to disrupt their operations,” said Major General Rick Lynch, Multi-National Force-Iraq spokesperson. ”By taking Abu Azzam off the street, another close associate of Zarqawi, we have dealt another serious blow to al-Zarqawi’s
terrorist organisation.”
Abu Azzam ”personally planned and ordered suicide car bomb attacks” in Baghdad and was responsible for financing for the group and its ”international communications,” Kubba said.
Abu Azzam’s death was followed by two other successes against al-Qaeda in Iraq’s leadership, officials said — the group’s leader in the northern city of Mosul surrendered to the Iraqi military and its leader in the town of Karabila in the sensitive region near the Syrian border was killed.
The Karabila leader, identified only as Abu Nasser, was killed along with several others on Monday in a raid on the group’s headquarters in the city, Kubba told a press conference, without elaborating. General Wafiq al-Samaraei, the Iraqi president’s national security adviser, said Abu Nasser was killed in a US airstrike.
The US military confirmed an airstrike in the region on Monday, but gave no details on casualties.
The area near the Syrian border is key to the infiltration of foreign fighters joining Iraq’s insurgency. Kubba acknowledged that ”foreigners move freely” in the region.
22 Iraqi men executed
Meanwhile, police on Tuesday found the corpses of 22 Iraqi men who had been shot in the head and dumped in a deserted area of Badrah district northeast of Kut city and 160km southeast of Baghdad, said Major Felah Al-Mohammedawi of Iraq’s Interior Ministry.
He said the victims were dressed in civilian clothing. Most had been blindfolded with their hands tied together with rope or strips of plastic. Al-Mohammedawi said the victims seemed to have been killed several days ago. Their identities were not immediately known, but the district near the Iranian border is mostly Shi’ite.
Several times in recent months large groups of bodies have been found in several areas of Iraq, including Baghdad. Police often blame Sunni-led insurgents for such executions. But Al-Mohammedawi said the killings near Kut would be investigated.
In Baqouba, 50km north of Baghdad, a suicide bomber with explosives hidden under his clothing, slipped into a police building where the Iraqis were applying to join Iraq’s Quick Reaction Police Force, said a police commander, who spoke on
condition of anonymity because of concerns about his security.
Nine Iraqis were killed and 21 wounded in the blast, said Adhid Mita’ab, an official in Baqouba General Hospital.
The attack on police, along with the newly announced US Marine death, raised to at least 62 the number of people killed in the past three days in Iraq, less than a month before a national referendum on Iraq’s draft Constitution.
In Baghdad, visiting Nato Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer opened a long-awaited training academy for Iraqi military officers.
”This centre makes and marks a significant step toward a more secure Iraq,” de Hoop Scheffer said after hoisting a Nato flag over the centre. ”Nato is here to help the Iraqi government to develop the tools it needs.
Nato’s role in Iraq has been limited to the training mission and to supplying equipment to Iraqi forces, due to opposition to any wider role led by France and Germany. – Sapa-AP