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Iraq

Iraq arrests bombing mastermind, it says

The lieutenant of a wanted militant admits to organizing many of the car bombings in Iraq since August 2003.

By Times wire
Published January 25, 2005

BAGHDAD - Security forces in Iraq have captured two senior aides to the most wanted militant in Iraq, bringing in his top bombmaker and his propaganda chief in the past 10 days, an Iraqi government spokesman said Monday.

The bombmaker confessed to masterminding most of the car bombings in Iraq, including the bloody 2003 assault on the U.N. headquarters in the capital, the spokesman said.

The announcements came hours after a suicide car bomb exploded near the headquarters of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's political party, injuring at least 10 people in the latest blast claimed by al-Qaida in Iraq. The bomb detonated at a checkpoint guarded by a special unit of the Iraqi police.

The captured bombmaker, Sami Muhammad Ali Said Jaaf, was a top lieutenant of the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant who has a $25-million bounty on his head.

Jaaf admitted to involvement in a substantial share of the car bombs that have exploded in Iraq since August 2003, said Thaer al-Naqib, a spokesman for interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.

Naqib said Jaaf, who went by the nom de guerre Abu Umar Kurdi, was captured in a raid in Baghdad on Jan. 15. There was no way of verifying Jaaf's admissions or the government's claim that he was involved in some 75 percent of the car bombings in Baghdad since August 2003.

In a flurry of pre-election good news, the government also announced the capture of Zarqawi's "chief of propaganda," 10 insurgent leaders in Ramadi, the capital of troubled Anbar province west of Baghdad, and a resistance leader in the violent northern city of Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city.

"Every arrest of a terrorist in Iraq is making our country safer, bringing us one step closer to a peaceful and prosperous Iraq," Naqib said.

Jaaf was said to have confessed to organizing many of the most notorious attacks in Iraq, including the September 2003 truck bombing of the United Nations headquarters; the car bomb that killed Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir Hakim outside a shrine in Najaf; the attack that killed Izzadine Saleem, the president of the Iraqi Governing Council, as his convoy approached the Green Zone in May 2004; and the September 2004 double car bombing at a water treatment plant in south Baghdad that killed dozens of children.

All told, the attacks killed hundreds, most of them civilians cut down by the devastating blast wave and shrapnel typically thrown hundreds of yards.

Since June 28, when the interim Iraqi government took power, there have been about 70 car bombings reported in or around Baghdad, according to an Associated Press tally. At least 372 people were killed and 1,038 were wounded.

And other bombmakers remain at large. A vehicle packed with explosives detonated Monday morning outside the headquarters of the political party led by Allawi, the Iraqi National Accord. It was the second bombing of the building near the capital's center this month.

Police said guards opened fire moments before the blast, a thunderous explosion that reverberated throughout the city center. Eight policemen and two civilians were wounded, according to Dr. Mudhar Abdul-Hussein of Yarmouk Hospital.

In an Internet posting, al-Qaida in Iraq said the attack was carried out by "one of the young lions in the suicide regiment" against the "agent of the Jews and the Christians."

However, Allawi's spokesman said, the government dealt a blow to al-Qaida in Iraq by arresting Zarqawi's "chief of propaganda," Hasam Hamad Abdullah Muhsin al-Dulaymi, known as "Dr. Hassan," in a raid before Jaaf was taken.

Naqib said Hassan took over distributing public statements for Zarqawi's network after his previous chief propagandist, Hassan Ibrahim, was killed by coalition forces in a Baghdad raid Dec. 13.

"Dr. Hassan has told us that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi designated Abu Umar al-Kurdi as the lieutenant responsible for attacking election sites located in Baghdad," Naqib said.

Iraq is scheduled to hold its first nationwide election in decades on Sunday. Zarqawi and other insurgents have threatened to disrupt the balloting and to kill voters after they return from the polls.

Zarqawi also recently issued a statement urging followers to buckle down for the long haul in Iraq, warning that the battle against U.S. and Iraqi forces in the country could drag on for years.

Allawi's spokesman seized on that statement as evidence that the terrorist leader is losing ground.

"The recent call by Zarqawi for patience tells us that he is losing his fight against the Iraqi people," Naqib said. "He is losing his key cell leaders, planners and bomb builders every day to Iraqi and coalition security forces."

Information from the Washington Post, Associated Press and New York Times was used in this report.

[Last modified January 25, 2005, 09:51:04]