Will the REAL al-Masri Please Stand Up!?!
Well… What can I say? My joy was short lived….
U.S. military says man held is not Iraq al Qaeda leader
By Dean Yates and Waleed Ibrahim
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The leader of al Qaeda in Iraq is still being hunted, the U.S. military said on Friday, after Iraqi officials declared Abu Ayyub al-Masri had been caught in what is the latest episode of false claims about the militant.
The detention of Masri would have been another blow for al Qaeda, which has been forced to regroup in northern Iraq after a wave of U.S. military assaults in and around Baghdad.
Iraqi security sources had already begun to cast doubt on the earlier announcement that Masri, an Egyptian with a U.S. bounty of $5 million on his head, had been picked up in an operation in the northern city of Mosul on Wednesday.
One senior Iraqi security source in Mosul said the man caught in that raid was an Iraqi.
“He has not been detained,” a senior U.S. military official told Reuters, without giving further details.
It is not the first time there has been confusion over the fate of Masri. Iraq’s Interior Ministry said a year ago he had been killed, but soon afterwards Sunni Islamist al Qaeda released an audio tape purportedly from him.
Al Qaeda in Iraq was headed by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi until he was killed in a U.S. air strike in June 2006. His successor, Masri, was Zarqawi’s close associate.
Earlier, Interior Ministry spokesman Major-General Abdul-Karim Khalaf said a detained associate of Masri took Iraqi security forces late on Wednesday to where the al Qaeda leader was apparently hiding.
Senior Iraqi security officials had earlier said a captured associate of Masri took Iraqi forces on Wednesday to where he was thought to be hiding. After being detained, the man said he was the al Qaeda in Iraq leader, who is also known as Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, they said.
But the detained man just happened to share the name Abu Hamza, which in Arabic means father of Hamza. “Abu” is a common way for men who have children to be addressed in the Arab world.
SHRINE ATTACK
U.S. officials blame al Qaeda in Iraq for most big bombings in the country, including an attack on a revered Shi’ite shrine in Samarra in February 2006 that set off a wave of sectarian killings that nearly tipped Iraq into all-out civil war.
A build-up of U.S. troops last year allowed the military to conduct a series of offensives against the group. The emergence of Sunni Arab tribal security units also helped to provide intelligence on al Qaeda activities.
The result was that al Qaeda has largely been pushed out of Baghdad and its former stronghold in the western province of Anbar to areas in northern Iraq like Mosul, which U.S. generals say is its last remaining urban stronghold in the country.
Al Qaeda in Iraq shares the name and ideology of Osama bin Laden’s network, which was blamed for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. Structural and operational ties between the two are unclear.
The U.S. military says al Qaeda in Iraq is largely foreign-led but that its foot soldiers are mainly Iraqis.
(Additional reporting by Waleed Ibrahim, Tim Cocks and Khalid al-Ansary; editing by Mark Trevelyan)
9 May, 2008 at 11:02 am
They’ll get ‘em. I just pray that they find him before November. If Obama is elected I have REAL concerns about what he will do over there. His arrogance, lack of experience, and super-liberal leanings all spell a recipe for dissaster in Iraq.
9 May, 2008 at 11:24 am
mklasing,
You know, I was just thinking about that not more than five minutes ago! God help us all….
9 May, 2008 at 11:04 pm
The real filthy pig will hopefully be caught soon,inshallah.