American and Iraqi Forces Kill Top-Ranking Al Qaeda Terrorist

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The New York Sun

BAGHDAD, Iraq – American and Iraqi authorities said yesterday their forces had killed the no. 2 official in the Al Qaeda in Iraq organization in a weekend raid in Baghdad, claiming to have struck a “painful blow” to the country’s most feared insurgent group.


Abdullah Abu Azzam led Al Qaeda’s operations in Baghdad, planning a brutal wave of suicide bombings in the capital since April, killing hundreds of people – including police, army recruits, and day laborers, officials said. According to an Associated Press tally, 698 people have been killed and 1,579 have been wounded since April 1 in suicide attacks in Baghdad.


He also controlled the finances for foreign fighters that flowed into Iraq to join the insurgency.


Abu Azzam, who a government spokesman said was an Iraqi, was the top deputy to Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Abu Azzam was on a list of Iraq’s 29 most-wanted insurgents issued by the American military in February and had a bounty of $50,000 on his head.


Al Qaeda in Iraq denied that Abu Az zam was the no. 2 leader of the organization and said “it was not confirmed” that he was killed. “Abu Azzam was one of Al Qaeda’s many soldiers and is the leader of one of its battalions operating in Baghdad,” the group said in an Internet statement by its spokesman, Abu Maysara al-Iraqi.


It called the American and Iraqi claims that he was the group’s top deputy “a futile attempt … to raise the morale of their troops.”


Elsewhere, a suicide bomber attacked Iraqis applying for jobs as policemen yesterday in Baqouba, 30 miles north of Baghdad, killing nine and wounding 21.


The American military also said a Marine was killed Monday by a roadside bomb in the town of Khaldiyah, west of Baghdad.


Police found the bodies of 22 Iraqi men who had been shot to death in southern Iraq, many of them bound and blindfolded, said Major Felah Al-Mohammedawi of the Interior Ministry. Their identities were not immediately known, but the district – north east of Kut, about 100 miles southeast of Baghdad – is mostly Shiite.


It was not immediately clear what effect Abu Azzam’s death would have on Al Qaeda in Iraq, which has been one of the deadliest terrorist groups, carrying out suicide attacks that targeted the country’s Shiite majority. The American military has claimed to have killed or captured leading al-Zarqawi aides in the past and attacks have continued unabated – although Abu Azzam appeared to be a more significant figure.


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