A senior Al Qaeda operative and several associated terrorist figures were captured last week by local Iraqi and U.S. forces, a senior administration official said Friday.
Hassan Ghul, described as the most senior associate of Osama bin Laden in Iraq, was picked up last week in the northern part of the country by Kurdish forces, the official said.
“He was a senior facilitator who was caught coming into the country,” the official said. Speculation was that Ghul, a Pakistani, was scouting out what Al Qaeda could do in the future against U.S. forces, the official said.
Ghul has been part of Al Qaeda for at least a decade and was known to deliver money to terrorist groups in the Middle East and Africa.
In Fallujah, west of Baghdad, U.S. troops last week raided a facility and captured Husam Yemeni and several associates who were identified as figures within Ansar al-Islam, the terrorist group that was once in northern Iraq but moved south after the U.S.-led invasion in March.
Ansar is headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian who has been accused of masterminding the October 2002 assassination of Laurence Foley, a U.S. Agency for International Development official who was shot outside his home in Amman.
Ansar has been identified as the major terrorist group operating against U.S. forces inside Iraq, and Yemeni is the highest-ranking member to have been captured.
Al-Zarqawi received medical treatment in Baghdad and was cited by Secretary of State Colin Powell in his Security Council speech last February as providing a link between deposed dictator Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Most U.S. intelligence analysts suspect al-Zarqawi operates his own network but has joined with Al Qaeda in some operations.
In other developments in Iraq, U.S. forces have arrested a father and son suspected of carrying out an attack on a forward base in which two American soldiers were killed, a military spokeswoman said Friday.
The soldiers were among nine people, including four Christian women headed to jobs at a U.S. military base, killed in attacks Wednesday and Thursday. South of the capital, the security chief of Spanish troops in Iraq was shot during a raid.
It appeared the women were targeted as part of a campaign to discourage Iraqis from cooperating with the occupation forces.
“The message is clear. The [anti-U.S.] elements … want to turn the clock back on Iraq,” coalition spokesman Dan Senor said. “They want to turn back to the era of mass graves and chemical attacks and torture chambers and rape rooms, and they will target Iraqis and Iraqi leaders who want to change that course and move Iraq forward.”
The father and son suspected of killing the two soldiers were detained Thursday without incident at their home in Hadid, a village 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, said Maj. Josslyn Aberle, spokeswoman for the 4th Infantry Division. No other details were available.
Two Iraqi police officers were killed Thursday and three others were wounded when gunmen fired on a police checkpoint between Fallujah and Ramadi, two other insurgency hotspots west of Baghdad.
The attack occurred along the same road where the day before assailants firing from a speeding car killed four Christian women and wounded six other people in a convoy headed for the U.S. military base at Habaniyah, 50 miles west of the capital.
Elsewhere, the Iraqi Communist Party headquarters in Baghdad was bombed, and two people were killed, officials said Friday.
The explosion occurred just after a meeting that ended Thursday evening. Those killed were party members who had remained in the office, including one imprisoned for 10 years during Hussein’s regime for having belonged to the then-banned organization.
Also Friday, two U.S. pilots were killed in northern Iraq when their Army helicopter crashed outside Qayyarah on Friday. The cause of the copter crash, the fourth this month in Iraq, was not immediately known, according to U.S. military officials.
