WASHINGTON — American military and intelligence officials are scrambling to confirm whether Iraqi forces yesterday wounded Al Qaeda’s no. 1 man in Iraq, Abu-Ayyub al-Masri.

Yesterday, Arab satellite stations reported first that a firefight outside of Baghdad on the road to Fallujah had claimed the life of Mr. Masri’s security chief, Abu Abdullah al-Majemaai and had wounded the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. The report was attributed to a spokesman for Iraq’s Interior Ministry. The Associated Press reported later that the deputy interior minister, Major General Hussein Ali Kama, had no information about the clash.

An American intelligence officer monitoring the situation said the Iraq command was attempting to verify the reports on the ground. American authorities in Baghdad and Washington have Mr. Masri’s dossier from the Egyptian government, which still has an outstanding warrant for his arrest. The dossier includes Mr. Masri’s fingerprints and DNA markings, according to this source.

The news of Mr. Masri’s wounding could be a major boost to the president’s new strategy to secure Baghdad and fight Al Qaeda as well as Shiite extremists and Iranian operatives. On Wednesday, American authorities had confirmed that a Shiite cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, had fled to Iran and is now hosted by radical elements of the regime’s security services.

Mr. Masri is considered by American military commanders to be a more capable leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq than his predecessor, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who American missiles exploded in June. To start, he has made early steps to establish a parallel political organization in the Sunni provinces in the center of Iraq — an organization that could be primed to take over political authority if American forces leave Iraq before the organization is decimated.

Mr. Masri is also much closer to the Qaeda leadership residing in the Waziristan province of Pakistan. He was a close associate of Ayman al-Zawahri in the 1980s, when the two men were key figures in Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the radical Islamic group that assassinated Anwar Sadat in 1981.

According to information from Marine and Army intelligence sources, which was first reported by The New York Sun, Mr. Masri also has made headway in taking control of the entire Sunni insurgency. The view of the Marines and Army is reflected in a dissenting footnote in the classified version of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq submitted to Congress earlier this month. The Sun first incorrectly reported the dissent as an addendum.

If Mr. Masri is too wounded to carry on his duties, a succession struggle could emerge for the leadership of the terrorist group. That may present an opportunity for Iraq’s government and America to split off the feuding factions from one another.

Meanwhile, an American intelligence officer said yesterday that Mr. Sadr’s flight to neighboring Iran was good news for the surge. “This pretty much takes away Sadr’s nationalist credentials. This helps us in terms of Iraqi perceptions but also perceptions in Washington, where he is often held up as one of the only independent Iraqi political actors.”

Yesterday, Iraq’s President Talabani said Mr. Sadr also ordered his top deputies to flee to Iran as well. “I think many of his top Mahdi army officials have been ordered to leave Iraq to make the mission of the security forces easier,” he said, according to the Reuters wire service.
Mr. Talabani also said he had word that Mr. Sadr had approved of the new security plan that the Iraqi government has developed for Baghdad and had given his approval to arrest outlaw members of his Mahdi army. Mr. Sadr first handed over names of outlaw Mahdi army officers to Prime Minister al-Maliki in November.

The Mahdi army has claimed credit for a campaign that they say is meant to target Sunni terrorists in Baghdad neighborhoods. However, the campaign has appeared in the last year to be targeting Sunni civilians at random, an effort to cleanse Iraq’s capital of the Sunni minority that ruled the country under Saddam Hussein.