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By Wire servicesMore than 2,000 U.S. soldiers descend on Samarra as information captured with Hussein continues to pay off.
The capture of Saddam Hussein continued to pay off for American forces Wednesday, as they conducted raids in a hotbed of resistance north of Baghdad and said documents seized with the former Iraqi president had given them insight into the insurgency, especially its organization and tactics.
At the same time, they warned that the rebels' desperation could make their violence even "more horrific."
More than 2,000 U.S. soldiers, acting on information recovered during the capture of Hussein, swept through the city of Samarra in a hunt for anti-American resistance leaders and fighters on Wednesday, a day after U.S. forces arrested 79 suspects in the city.
The top commander of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf region said Hussein's capture had given U.S. authorities valuable insight into the structure and operations of the resistance.
"I don't want to characterize it as a great intelligence windfall," said Army Gen. John Abizaid, the head of U.S. Central Command. "But it's clear that we have gained a greater understanding of how things work as a result of capturing him and looking over his environment and understanding the whole picture."
Information gained from the capture, coupled with intelligence gathered during an intensified effort over the past two months, has contributed to "a good haul" of more suspected insurgents, Abizaid said. He described those detained as "several midlevel Baathist leaders of cells in areas that we haven't had the opportunity to really get a good grip on previously."
Overall, the insurgency is showing signs of central planning by former officials of Hussein's regime - figures who coordinate strikes hundreds of miles apart and provide cash and expertise to guerrilla cells, the Associated Press reported, quoting an unnamed senior U.S. military official.
In Samarra, it couldn't be immediately determined how many suspected guerrillas were arrested in what American military commanders dubbed Operation Ivy Blizzard.
But Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, identified nine Iraqis taken into custody Wednesday as "midlevel" operatives: "financiers, organizers, arms suppliers."
The town is within the so-called Sunni triangle, the region north of Baghdad dominated by minority Sunni Muslims, the bedrock of Hussein's regime. The anti-U.S. insurgency, which has killed nearly 200 American soldiers since President Bush declared an end to major combat operations May 1, is concentrated in the region, and support for the former dictator remains strong there.
American military commanders began a series of operations Sunday to capture individuals on the list captured with Hussein who hadn't already gone into hiding, including three former generals believed to have been financing and overseeing guerrilla attacks in the Baghdad area.
The raids in Samarra began Tuesday with the arrests of 79 suspected resistance members, including a suspected guerrilla leader, during a meeting in a building in which they apparently were planning attacks.
"We think it was a complete cell we caught," Odierno told a Pentagon news service Wednesday.
The latest operation in Samarra started before dawn Wednesday and involved more than 2,000 soldiers, tanks and armored vehicles from the 4th Infantry Division. U.S.-recruited Iraqi security forces assisted in the sweep.
Other facets of the operation included a hearts-and-minds effort to boost links with the city's leaders, recruit new members for the police and other local security forces, and identify and fund infrastructure projects to improve the lives of the city's 200,000 residents, Central Command said.
Odierno, whose troops helped catch Hussein, said U.S. military officials were "still working through the intelligence we captured" with the former dictator.
In the northern city of Mosul, Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, said documents found with Hussein confirmed that the former president had had contact with several suspected Iraqi insurgents long sought by U.S. forces in northwestern Iraq.
Knight Ridder Newspapers quoted unnamed intelligence officials as saying no arrests were made as a result of information that Hussein provided in his interrogations, which they described as being very preliminary.
But the AP, quoting the unnamed senior military official, reported that intelligence information shows the shadowy overseers of the insurgency maintain communications with cells made up of a core of about 5,000 anti-U.S. guerrillas, who, in turn, have recruited thousands of part-time fighters from Iraq's mosques and its vast pool of unemployed and angry citizens.
The official cautioned that the guerrillas displayed no signs of a strict command-and-control hierarchy in the conventional military sense, but said dozens of independent cells have received some guidance from above.
Until now, the U.S. military has based its theories on interrogation reports from captured midlevel guerrillas or leaders familiar only with their own cells, the AP reported, quoting the unnamed military official. The compartmentalized nature of Iraq's guerrilla movement and the lack of strict central control have made the job especially difficult.
But central coordination can be seen in the anti-U.S. or pro-Hussein demonstrations that crop up simultaneously in cities across the country, and in the types of bombs and tactics used in ambushes, the official said.
In some cases, "signature bombs" are used, devices so similar their design suggests they came from the same source, the AP reported, quoting the unnamed official.
In the Sunni Muslim areas north of Baghdad, Col. Frederick Rudesheim of the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division said the insurgency seems to consist of "very small" cells under the control of "a few individuals."
The AP, quoting the unnamed military official in Baghdad, reported that guerrilla recruiting is done in mosques, through networks of friends, and among the pool of disenfranchised Iraqis - especially Sunni Muslims - and the unemployed, including some 400,000 former soldiers and 25,000 senior Baath Party members disbanded in May by order of U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer.
Penetrating mosques to learn about recruiting has been especially tough for U.S. military intelligence, the official said.
The official described the difficult job of interrogating scores of prisoners rounded up each day whose role in the insurgency is often unclear. The detainees arrive only with "capture tags" that describe the general reason for their arrests. Interrogators and linguists, both of which are scarce, then try to "break" the prisoner and retrieve the person's knowledge of the insurgency.
Abizaid, Odierno and Petraeus spoke to reporters traveling with Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who is touring the region. The generals emphasized that much work still needs to be done to defeat the Iraqi resistance but also gave the strong impression that they believed a corner had been turned after months of trying to penetrate the networks of insurgents.
Asked about the size of the insurgency, Abizaid stuck by the estimate he gave last month of about 5,000 resistance fighters. He said the capture of Hussein had dealt the insurgency "a huge psychological blow" that would "pay great benefits over time." But he predicted "still a lot of violence ahead in Iraq."
Abizaid said the level of violence has tended to ebb and flow.
"There's a notion, I think, that a lot of people have that this is linear," he said. "But it's really not linear. It's more like a sine wave."
Odierno predicted that attacks would become "more horrific," involving more suicide bombers and vehicles laden with explosives, "because everything else hasn't worked" and the insurgents "don't have much else left."
- Information from Knight Ridder Newspapers, the Associated Press and Washington Post was used in this report.