BAGHDAD, 10 May 2008 — The leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq is still being hunted, the US military said yesterday, after Iraqi officials wrongly declared Abu Ayyub Al-Masri had been caught.
The detention of Masri would have been another blow for Al-Qaeda, which has been forced to regroup in northern Iraq after a wave of US military assaults in and around Baghdad.
Iraqi officials said the confusion was caused after a man with a similar name was detained in an operation in the northern city of Mosul late on Wednesday.
Al-Masri, an Egyptian, has a US bounty of $5 million on his head. “He has not been detained,” a senior US military official told Reuters, declining to comment further.
Government spokesman Ali Dabbagh criticized Iraqi officials for earlier saying Al-Masri had been caught.
“The person who was detained has nothing to do with him. He is not even a senior leader in Al-Qaeda; he is just an ordinary member,” Dabbagh said.
It is not the first time there has been confusion over the fate of Al-Masri. Iraq’s Interior Ministry said a year ago he had been killed, but soon afterward Al-Qaeda released an audiotape from him.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq was headed by the Jordanian Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi until he was killed in a US airstrike in June 2006. His successor, Al-Masri, was Al-Zarqawi’s close associate.
Senior Iraqi security officials had earlier said a captured associate of Al-Masri took Iraqi forces on Wednesday to where he was thought to be hiding. After being detained, the man said he was the Al-Qaeda in Iraq leader, who is also known as Abu Hamza Al-Muhajir, they said.
But the detained man just happened to share the name Abu Hamza.
US officials blame Al-Qaeda in Iraq for most big bombings in the country, including an attack on a popular mosque in Samarra in February 2006 that set off a wave of sectarian killings that nearly tipped Iraq into all-out civil war.
A buildup of US troops last year allowed the military to conduct a series of offensives against the group. The emergence of Iraqi tribal security units also helped to provide intelligence on Al-Qaeda activities.
The result was that Al-Qaeda has largely been pushed out of Baghdad and its former stronghold in the western province of Anbar to areas in northern Iraq like Mosul, which US generals say is its last remaining urban stronghold in the country.
