U.S.: Al-Zarqawi No. 2 killed in Baghdad

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BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. and Iraqi authorities said Tuesday their forces had killed the No. 2 official in the al-Qaida in Iraq organization in a weekend raid in Baghdad, claiming to have struck a “painful blow” to the country’s most feared insurgent group.

Abdullah Abu Azzam led al-Qaida’s operations in Baghdad, planning a brutal wave of suicide bombings in the capital since April, 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 spokesman 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 U.S. military in February and had a bounty of $50,000 on his head.

Al-Qaida denial
Al-Qaida in Iraq denied that Abu Azzam was the No. 2 leader of the organization and said “it was not confirmed” that he was killed. “Abu Azzam was one of al-Qaida’s many soldiers and is the leader of one of its battalions operating in Baghdad,” the group said in an Internet statement by its spokesman, Abu Maysara al-Iraqi.

It called the U.S. and Iraqi claims that he was the group’s top deputy “a futile attempt ... to raise the morale of their troops.”

Elsewhere, a suicide bomber attacked Iraqis applying for jobs as policemen Tuesday in Baqouba, 30 miles north of Baghdad, killing nine and wounding 21.

The U.S. military also said a Marine was killed Monday by a roadside bomb in the town of Khaldiyah, west of Baghdad. The death brought to 1,918 the number of U.S. troops who have died since the Iraq war started in 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

Police found the bodies of 22 Iraqi men who had been shot to death in southern Iraq, many of them bound and blindfolded, said Maj. Felah Al-Mohammedawi of the Interior Ministry. Their identities were not immediately known, but the district — northeast of Kut, about 100 miles southeast of Baghdad — is mostly Shiite.

'Painful blow' to al-Qaida
It was not immediately clear what effect Abu Azzam’s death would have on al-Qaida in Iraq, which has been one of the deadliest militant groups, carrying out suicide attacks that targeted the country’s Shiite majority. The U.S. military has claimed to have killed or captured leading al-Zarqawi aides in the past and attacks have continued unabated — although Abu Azzam appeared to be a more significant figure.

Iraqi government spokesman Laith Kubba called the killing of Abu Azzam a “painful blow” to al-Qaida, but warned that the group would likely carry out revenge attacks.

Abu Azzam was killed early Sunday when U.S. and Iraqi forces raided a high-rise apartment building in Baghdad, Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, a U.S. military spokesman, told the AP.

“They went in to capture him, he did not surrender, and he was killed in the raid,” Boylan said.

The Iraqi and U.S. 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.

Long list of bloody deeds
Abu Azzam — whose real name is Abdullah Najim Abdullah Mohamed Al-Jawari — was the No. 2 figure in al-Qaida 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 U.S.-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, 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.

“We continue to decimate the leadership of the al-Qaeda in Iraq terrorist network and continue to disrupt their operations,” said Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, Multi-National Force-Iraq spokesman. “By taking Abu Azzam off the street, another close associate of Zarqawi, we have dealt another serious blow to al-Zarqawi’s terrorist organization.”

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.

Other leaders killed
Abu Azzam’s death was followed by two other successes against al-Qaida 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, died along with several others Monday in a raid on the group’s headquarters in the city, Kubba told a news conference, without elaborating. Gen. Wafiq al-Samaraei, the Iraqi president’s national security adviser, said Abu Nasser was killed in a U.S. airstrike. The U.S. military confirmed an airstrike in the region 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.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9498356/page/2/