IRAQ: US forces in Iraq seized four relatives of Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, the most wanted man in the country and a suspected mastermind behind attacks on US troops.
US military police swooped on two homes in the town of Samarra, about 100 km north of Baghdad and a hotbed of anti-American insurgency, and detained four nephews of the former Saddam Hussein henchman in a pre-dawn raid yesterday.
Ibrahim is number six on the US military's 55-most-wanted list and carries a $10 million bounty on his head. Following Saddam Hussein's capture in December, he is the most wanted man in Iraq. The US military thinks two of the detained men may have been helping to find safe houses for Ibrahim.
LieuCol David Poirier, commander of 720th Military Police Battalion based in Fort Hood, Texas, said the relatives were Ibrahim's "enablers" and had good information on his whereabouts.
"We think that brought us one step closer to finding him," Lieu Col Poirier told reporters. Ibrahim's wife and daughter were detained in late November and one of his houses near Tikrit was destroyed in a US bombing campaign.
A week later US forces carried out a raid which they said may have just missed capturing the man himself.
Meanwhile, a document found with Saddam Hussein when he was captured warned his supporters to be cautious about linking up with foreigners coming into Iraq to fight Americans, a US official said yesterday.
"It's a document in which he urges his supporters to be cautious in dealing with jihadists," the official said. "The implication is because he can't entirely trust these guys."
The document, found with the toppled Iraqi president when he was captured on December 13th, does not say supporters should avoid dealing with foreign fighters, but that they should be wary because their goals may not be the same, the official said.
The New York Times, which first reported on the document, said it was a second piece of evidence challenging the Bush administration's claim of close co-operation between Saddam's government and al-Qaeda.
At least 21 US troops have committed suicide in Iraq, a growing toll that represents one in seven of American "non-hostile" deaths since the war began last March, the Pentagon's senior health official said yesterday.