DUBAI/BAGHDAD, 6 May 2007 — The leader of Al-Qaeda’s Iraq branch, who was reportedly killed in insurgent infighting this week, surfaced in a purported new voice recording posted on an Islamist website yesterday.
The voice denied the reported internal clashes among Sunni Arab militants in which Abu Ayyub Al-Masri was said to have died. “What you hear in the news on satellite channels about fighting between us and Jihadist groups, or with our (Sunni Arab) tribes is just lies and fabrication,” the voice said.
“It is a desperate attempt to divide the Jihadist ranks,” it added. Iraqi authorities said on Tuesday that they were investigating reports that Masri, known to Islamists as Abu Hamza Al-Muhajer, had died in internal clashes among insurgent groups.
The US military said it could not confirm the death of the Al-Qaeda commander, whose demise has been reported more than once in the past, and Iraqi officials acknowledged that they had not laid hands on Masri’s corpse.
The Islamic State of Iraq — an Al-Qaeda-led coalition of Sunni insurgent groups — insisted Masri was still alive in an Internet statement posted on Tuesday and also denied the infighting. But in a challenge to Al-Qaeda, three rival Sunni Islamist insurgent groups announced that they were joining forces in a rival front to the Islamic State.
“In order to confront local, regional, and international challenges, an agreement has been concluded between three groups, the Islamic Army in Iraq, the Army of the Mujahedeen, and the Ansar Al-Sunna to form a united front,” the new group said in an Internet statement. Muhajer slammed the Iraqi Islamic Party for dealing with the government of Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki and urged the militant factions which had formed the rival front not to confront Al-Qaeda. “On the same day on which two factions that belong to the (Sunni) Islamic Party announced their unification, the leaders of the Islamic Party announced war on ... the Mujahedeen,” he said.
In Baghdad, a suicide bomber killed nine police recruits and wounded 13 others when he detonated his explosive-packed vest outside an Iraqi Army base west of the Iraqi capital yesterday, an Iraqi Army source said.
The blast occurred near the Abu Ghraib prison west in Anbar province. Another army source confirmed the suicide attack but had no precise casualty figures.
Insurgents have repeatedly targeted US-trained Iraqi security forces and recruitment centers. They have recently stepped up attacks in Sunni Arab Anbar after many tribes began recruiting locals in a bid to expel Al-Qaeda militants from the province.
In the capital, a suicide bomber blew up a vehicle against a police station in the western Yarmuk neighborhood, killing one officer and wounding 10, medical and security sources said.
A mortar round killed a woman and wounded two men in the largely Shiite southwestern neighborhood of Bayaa, one of the fault lines of the sectarian fighting in Baghdad.
In the northern city of Kirkuk, a roadside bomb targeting a passing police patrol killed a bystander. A curfew imposed in the city of Samarra, north of the capital, after the killing of a policeman Friday remained in force.
