U.S. Troops Raid Iraqi Village Near Iran

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http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=540&e=8&u=/ap/20030811/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_operation_cliffhanger_1


By D'ARCY DORAN, Associated Press Writer

AIN LALIN, Iraq - U.S. forces raided a village near the Iranian border Monday in search of an Iraqi official who allegedly planned attacks on American troops, but failed to find him.



The former regime member is on the U.S. list of 55 most-wanted Iraqis and who has gained a growing importance as the coalition thins the ranks of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s inner circle, said Lt. Col. Mark Young. Young would not name the target.


His 67th Armored Regiment's 3rd Battalion sealed off the village during the raid.


"If I was Saddam Hussein, I would be sleeping with one eye open and probably be a nervous wreck by now," Young said. "He's got to hear footsteps behind him."


Soldiers detained about 70 men and were questioning many of them late Monday, 4th Infantry spokeswoman Maj. Josslyn Aberle said. Soldiers also found five arms caches, including mortars, tank rounds and artillery rounds, she said.


The raid, which the Army dubbed Operation Cliffhanger, began when the silhouettes of 14 Black Hawks crept in low behind a ridge just east of the village and dropped off soldiers who cut off escape routes the south and east.


Tanks rumbled in from the west. Apache helicopter gunships swooped down on the village as U.S. Air Force A-10 tankbuster planes and F-15 fighters flew overhead.


There was no resistance and soldiers from the 8th Infantry Regiment's 2nd Brigade searched door to door and entered each of the village's 40 houses.


The village, 30 miles from the border with Iran, is in a rural area where U.S. forces had not yet established a presence, Young said.


"To maintain the element of surprise, we intentionally had not gone close to this area," Young said.


The Army had been warned that its target had men on lookout and may have had anti-aircraft guns set up in the village, Young said.

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http://www.msnbc.com/news/870749.asp

Americans launch new sweep in Iraq
One GI killed, 5 wounded in two attacks; Basra calm after riot


Aug. 11 — Continued unrest in northern Iraq, including two attacks that left one U.S. soldier dead and five others wounded, led American commanders to launch a new sweep Monday aimed at rooting out the Saddam Hussein loyalists and foreign fighters believed to be responsible for the armed resistance. To the south, meanwhile, British troops restored badly needed electricity to parts of Basra and supervised distribution of gasoline after two days of demonstrations over fuel and power shortages.


No other details were immediately available. The identities of the casualties were not released pending notification of next of kin.
The death brought to 57 the number of U.S. troops killed in action since May 1, when President Bush declared major combat over.

VIOLENCE CONTINUES
There were other outbreaks of violence on Monday.
Three soldiers were wounded, one seriously, in a combined bomb and rocket-propelled grenade attack on Monday near the town of Shumayt, north of Tikrit, according to U.S. military officials.
In Baghdad, U.S. soldiers said three Iraqis had been killed after an American convoy was attacked with a grenade.
One American soldier told ******* that the Iraqis involved in the attack had been chased down and shot. But locals said the dead were innocent bystanders, and accused U.S. troops of firing wildly.



The military reported Sunday that four American soldiers were wounded in guerrilla attacks, including two at the Baghdad University complex and two others in Tikrit.
Officials with the 4th Infantry Division said that the continuing attacks had prompted a new mission, Operation Ivy Lightning.
“Ivy Lightning is a surgical strike in remote towns ... to isolate and capture non-compliant forces and former regime loyalists who are planning attacks against coalition forces,” Lt.-Col. William MacDonald told reporters in Tikrit.
He said the operation was focusing on the area around Qara Tappa, about 80 miles north of Baghdad. In the initial hours of the sweep, about a dozen suspects were apprehended and five weapons caches seized, officials said.



Despite the almost-daily attacks on Americans in Iraq, President Bush offered an upbeat assessment of conditions in the country in his weekly radio address on Saturday.
Marking 100 days since he donned a flight suit, landed on an aircraft carrier off the California coast and announced major combat operations over in Iraq, Bush vowed a “long-term undertaking” to bring democracy and economic prosperity to Iraq and across the Middle East.
“One hundred days is not enough time to undo the terrible legacy of Saddam Hussein,” Bush said. “There is difficult and dangerous work ahead that requires time and patience.”

U.K. TROOPS PATROL TENSE BASRA
In Basra, the restoration of electricity to parts of the city and supervised distribution of gasoline calmed the tense city, coalition officials said.
British troops patrolling the area gave away their own fuel to calm the demonstrators, coalition spokesman Charles Heatly said from Baghdad. He said coalition forces also brought in two new gas turbine generators to try to patch up the antiquated electricity system, and British soldiers were supervising distribution at gas stations to make sure people were not charged exorbitant black-market prices.
But electricity was not flowing in all parts of the city, and two Iraqi officials told ******* on Monday that the main southern oil refinery and its sole crude oil export terminal had both stopped operating due to power failures.


The general manager of the southern refineries company said the plant stopped completely on Sunday night while an official at the Gulf port of Mina al Bakr said loadings of vital oil exports halted early on Monday.
The Basra refinery manager, Thair Ibrahim said there was no timetable for a restart of the 280,000-barrels-per-day plant, a key supplier of gasoline to the war-torn country.
“It’s zero. We don’t have any electricity since yesterday night,” Ibrahim said.
Basra had been one of the quietest cities in the country until the fuel and power shortages triggered the weekend protests, which saw 1,000 protesters block roads with rows of burning tires and throw rocks at vehicles and British troops. Only minor injuries were reported among the British troops, though an Iraqi protester and a Nepalese security guard were shot dead on Sunday.
The protester was killed after an angry crowd tried to block four four-wheel drive vehicles crossing the main bridge leading to the airport and the British military headquarters. It was not clear who shot the demonstrator.



The dead guard worked for Global Security, a private company hired to provide security and other services for coalition bases throughout the country. The guard was bringing mail from Kuwait to United Nations staff in Basra. He was shot by an unknown assailant as a two-car convoy neared an intersection in the center of the city, coalition spokesman Iain Pickard said.
Late Sunday, two bombs exploded about 60-70 yards from the British office in central Baghdad, witnesses said. There was no visible damage to the office, but a Syrian national who was part of a convoy of trucks taking supplies to the office was injured, according to the witnesses.
There was no indication whether the British office was the target. U.S. troops removed the truck in which the Syrian was injured within the hour of the explosion.
“The attack was in the vicinity of the British embassy but it did not target in any way the embassy,” an American military spokesman said.


A team of FBI investigators, meanwhile, searched the bombed Jordanian Embassy, where a car bomb on Aug. 7 killed 19 people.
The attack rattled Baghdad residents who feared it signaled a rise of terror tactics in the already violent Iraqi capital. L. Paul Bremer, the top civilian administrator in Iraq, said the al-Qaida-linked Ansar al-Islam group was at the top of his list of suspected terrorist organizations operating in the country.



Bremer told The New York Times in an interview published Sunday that hundreds of fighters from Ansar al-Islam had escaped to Iran and then slipped back into Iraq after the cessation of major combat.
“My initial instinct was to believe that this had to be done from somebody from outside,” the Times quoted him as saying. “But I have been told we captured and spoke to some ex-regime people and that there was part of the Mukhabarat (Iraqi intelligence) that specialized in sophisticated bombing and it is possible that this kind of technique did exist,” he told the Times.

OTHER DEVELOPMENTS
One U.S. soldier died of heat stroke and another was found dead in his living quarters on Sunday, the U.S. military said.
The military announced that Saddam’s former interior minister — No. 29 on the list of 55 most-wanted Iraqis — is in U.S. custody. Mahmud Dhiyab Al-Ahmad surrendered to coalition forces Friday, U.S. Central Command said in a statement.