U.S. and Iraqi troops swept into towns along the Euphrates River valley on Saturday in a push to flush out insurgentswho have vowed to kill Americans and wreck Iraq's transition to democracy. As politicians haggled in Baghdad overwho will get which posts in the new government, U.S. Marines and Iraqi soldiers fought militants in the towns ofHaditha and Ramadi, capital of the vast and often lawless western province of Anbar. Some intelligence reports havesuggested Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq and the man who has claimedresponsibility for many of the deadliest attacks in the country, has been hiding in the Haditha area.
The Iraqi government said on Friday it had captured a senior aide to Zarqawi, Abu Qutaybah, close to the border withSyria, and has vowed to get Zarqawi himself. "We are at the closest point to Zarqawi," Iraq's minister of state fornational security, Kassim Daoud, said on Saturday. Troops in tanks and armored cars stormed Haditha in the middle ofthe night, blowing up a weapons cache and exchanging small arms fire with guerrillas. But if militants were holed upthere they appeared to have fled and resistance was light.
In Ramadi, witnesses reported fierce gun battles between U.S. troops and insurgents. One said a U.S. armoredHumvee was destroyed, although this could not be confirmed. A hospital official said at least one person was killedand 15 injured. Anbar, which accounts for nearly a third of Iraq's area and stretches from Baghdad to the westernborders with Jordan, Syria and Saudia Arabia, has long been a thorn in the side of troops trying to stamp out theinsurgency. Militants have effective control of some towns and villages, and the U.S. military acknowledged this weekthe security situation in the province had deteriorated too far.
The Marines are trying to stabilize the Euphrates corridor, which runs up to the Syrian border, but have sometimesfound that when they arrive in a town, the insurgents they are looking for are nowhere to be seen.
