Zarqawi's death leads to 'huge treasure' of information

US and Iraqi forces killed 104 insurgents in hundreds of raids since last week’s killing of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and the American death toll in the war in Iraq hit 2,500, the US military said today.

Even as the Iraqi government released a document found in al-Zarqawi’s hideout that appeared to show the insurgency was weakening, new violence erupted. Gunmen shot and killed 10 Shiites in Baqouba, north-east of Baghdad.

Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, meanwhile, pressed forward with his initiative to crack down on violence in Baghdad, but he postponed a news conference at which he was expected to unveil details of a new initiative to promote national reconciliation.

US officials also identified the man claiming to have succeeded al-Zarqawi as head of the al Qaida in Iraq terrorist group as Abu Ayyub al-Masri, an Egyptian with ties to al Qaida.

American and Iraqi forces have carried out 452 raids since the June 7 killing of al-Zarqawi, and 104 insurgents were killed in those actions, said US military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell.

The nationwide raids led to the discovery of 28 significant arms caches, Caldwell said.

He said 255 of the raids were joint operations, while 143 were carried out by Iraqi forces alone. The raids also resulted in the captures of 759 “anti-Iraqi elements.”

The Pentagon’s announcement that 2,500 US troops had died since the war in Iraq began more than three years ago did not include any details on when the milestone was reached.

The news underscored the continuing violence in Iraq, just as an upbeat President Bush returned on Wednesday from Baghdad and refused to give a timetable or benchmark for success that would allow the 132,000 US troops to come home.

According to the Pentagon totals, 1,972 service members have been killed in action in Iraq, and another 528 died from other non-hostile causes. There also have been 18,490 troops wounded in action, including 8,501 who did not return to duty.

The 10 Iraqi men killed Thursday were pulled off a bus in Baqouba near where al-Zarqawi was killed in an airstrike. The 10 men – nine workers at the city’s industrial area and the driver – were between the ages of 20 and 45 and were heading back to their homes, a police officer said.

The workers included three brothers and six other relatives. The gunmen sped away in two black sedans, the officer said.

Caldwell said al-Zarqawi’s successor apparently is the same person as a man identified by the nom de guerre Abu Hamza al-Muhajer who has claimed to have succeeded al-Zarqawi and vowed to avenge him in threatening Web statements in recent days.

The Afghanistan-trained Al-Masri, an explosives expert, was a key figure in the al-Qaida in Iraq network and was long responsible for facilitating the movement of foreign fighters from Syria into Baghdad, Caldwell said at a news conference.

Al-Masri has been a terrorist since 1982, “beginning with his involvement in the Egyptian Islamic Jihad,” which was led by Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, Caldwell said.

Authorities said a document found in al-Zarqawi’s hideout that includes a blueprint for trying to foment a war between the US and Iran and also appears to show that the insurgency in Iraq is weakening.

The document said the insurgency was being hurt by the US military’s programme to train Iraqi security forces, by massive arrests and seizures of weapons, by tightening the militants’ financial outlets, and by creating divisions within its ranks.

“Generally speaking and despite the gloomy present situation, we find that the best solution in order to get out of this crisis is to involve the US forces in waging a war against another country or any hostile groups,” the document said.

“We mean specifically attempting to escalate the tension between America and Iran, and American and the Shiite in Iraq,” it quoted the documents as saying, especially among moderate followers of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most influential Shiite cleric in Iraq.

The document’s authenticity could not be independently verified.

National Security Adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie called it “the beginning of the end of al Qaida in Iraq.”

“Now we have the upper hand,” he said at a news conference in Baghdad. “We feel that we know their locations, the names of their leaders, their whereabouts, their movements, through the documents we found during the last few days.”

He also said he believed the security situation in the country would improve enough to allow a large number of US-led forces to leave Iraq by the end of this year, and a majority to depart by the end of next year. “And maybe the last soldier will leave Iraq by mid-2008,” he said.

But that suggestion was quickly dismissed by the minister of national security, Sherwan al-Waili, who said the issue of foreign troop withdrawal was up to the Iraqi parliament.

The US military spokesman said he had received no specific timeline from US Gen. George Casey, the top US commander in Iraq, but stressed the military was in Iraq as “guests here of the government of Iraq and at which time they tell us that they’re ready to have us return home, we will in fact depart.”

Al-Rubaie said a laptop, flashdrive and other documents were found in the debris after the airstrike that killed the al Qaida in Iraq leader last week outside Baqouba, and more information has been uncovered in raids of other insurgent hideouts since then.

He called it a “huge treasure ... a huge amount of information.”

Baghdad was in the second day of a huge security crackdown, dubbed Operation Forward Together, involving 75,000 Iraqi army and police forces backed by US forces.

Gunmen killed an engineer and kidnapped another, and a detergent factory worker was shot to death as he was headed to work elsewhere in western Baghdad, police said, but no major violence was reported in the capital, a day after Maliki’s major security operation was launched.

Elsewhere, however, gunmen stormed a Sunni mosque near Tikrit, killing four people and wounding 15, including a fundamentalist Sunni cleric who has spoken out against the killing of Iraqis as part of the insurgency.

Maliki opened the door Wednesday for talks with insurgents opposed to the country’s political process as part of a national reconciliation initiative, but he said any negotiations would exclude terrorist groups. The plan could include a pardon for some prisoners.

Deputy Justice Minister Busho Ibrahim said 421 Iraqi prisoners were released from US detention centres in Iraq on today, the latest batch of a total of 2,500 to be freed this month as part of al-Maliki’s national reconciliation efforts.