BAGHDAD, 28 September 2005 — US and Iraqi forces killed the second most powerful figure in the Al-Qaeda in Iraq organization in a weekend raid in Baghdad, the US military and Iraqi officials said yesterday.
Abdullah Abu Azzam led Al-Qaeda’s operations in Baghdad, planning a brutal wave of suicide bombings that hit the capital since April this year, killing hundreds of people, officials said. He also controlled the finances for foreign fighters who came to Iraq to join the insurgency.
Abu Azzam, who an Iraqi government spokesman said was an Iraqi, was the top deputy to the group’s leader, Jordanian militant Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi. Abu Azzam was on a list of Iraq’s 29 most wanted insurgents issued by the US military in February and had a bounty of $50,000 on his head.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq denied that Abu Azzam was the No. 2 leader of the organization and said “it was not confirmed” that he was killed. “Abu Azzam is 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 signed by its spokesman Abu Maysara Al-Iraqi.
It called the US and Iraqi claims that he was the group’s top deputy “a futile attempt... to raise the morale of their troops.”
Meanwhile, police yesterday found the bodies of 22 Iraqi men who had been shot dead in southern Iraq, and a suicide bomber attacked Iraqis applying for jobs as policemen in a city north of Baghdad, killing nine and wounding 21.
The US military announced that a Marine was killed a day earlier by a roadside bomb in the town of Khaldiyah, west of Baghdad. The death brought to 1,918 the number of US service members who have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
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 militant groups, carrying out suicide attacks targeting in particular the country’s Shiite majority. The US military has claimed to have killed or captured leading Zarqawi aides in the past and attacks have continued unabated — though Abu Azzam appeared to be a more significant figure.
Iraqi government spokesman Laith Kubba called the killing of Abu Azzam a “painful blow” to Al-Qaeda, but warned that the group would likely carry out revenge attacks.
Abu Azzam — whose real name is Abdullah Najim Abdullah Mohamed Al-Jawari — was killed early Sunday when US and Iraqi forces raided a high-rise apartment building in Baghdad, Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, a US military spokesman, said. “They went in to capture him, he did not surrender and he was killed in the raid,” Boylan said.
The Iraqi and US forces targeted the building after a tip from an Iraqi citizen, Kubba said. During the raid, the troops captured another militant in the apartment with Abu Azzam, Kubba added.
The corpses of the 22 Iraqi men, who had been shot in the head, were found dumped in a deserted area of Badrah district northeast of Kut city and 160 km southeast of Baghdad, said Maj. Felah Al-Mohammedawi of Iraq’s Interior Ministry.
He said the victims were dressed in civilian clothing. Most had been blindfolded with their hands tied together with rope or strips of plastic.
Al-Mohammedawi said the victims seemed to have been killed several days ago. Their identities were not immediately known, but the district near the Iranian border is mostly Shiite.
In another development, a would-be suicide car bomber infiltrated the heavily fortified Green Zone in central Baghdad but was stopped by US Marines at an internal checkpoint and detained before he could set off the explosives, the military said.
