American forces may have found headquarters of insurgents

A U.S. Marine commander cautioned that fighting will continue throughout the country.

By Tini Tran ~ The Associated Press

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- U.S. troops sweeping through Fallujah on Thursday said they believe they have found the suspected command center of the insurgent group headed by Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

In video shot by an embedded CNN cameraman, soldiers walked through an imposing building with concrete columns and with a large sign in Arabic on the wall reading "Al Qaida Organization" and "There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger."

Inside the building, U.S. soldiers found documents, old computers, notebooks, photographs and copies of the Quran. There also were two letters inside the house, one from al-Zarqawi giving instructions to two of his lieutenants in the region and another seeking money and help from the terrorist leader.

Al-Zarqawi last month renamed his group al-Qaida in Iraq, and his followers have been blamed for a number of deadly bombings and beheadings of foreign hostages, including three Americans and a Briton. The United States has offered a $25 million reward for his capture or killing -- the same amount as for Osama bin Laden.

The senior U.S. Marine commander in Iraq cautioned that the discovery by soldiers in Fallujah was still being investigated.

"I cannot stand here and tell you that we found the command and control house or building where Zarqawi went ahead and orchestrated and dealt his [car bombs] ... and the other death and destruction that he has spread throughout the country of Iraq," Lt. Gen. John Sattler told reporters at the Pentagon in a video teleconference from Fallujah. "We will continue to look for that."

Detaining relatives

In neighboring Jordan, authorities detained al-Zarqawi's nephew near the border with Iraq, a distant relative and a clergyman close to the family said Thursday.

The clergyman and the relative, both of whom spoke on condition of anonymity, said security officials had informed the family that Mohammed al-Harahsheh was detained last month. The relative said al-Harahsheh was being questioned on suspicion of attempting to infiltrate into Iraq to join his militant uncle.

Calls to Al-Zarqawi's family home in Zarqa, an industrial city northeast of the Jordanian capital, Amman, went unanswered.

Also, Sattler said the U.S.-led offensive launched last week in Fallujah has "broken the back of the insurgency" by seizing their main base of operations.

"We feel right now that we have, as I mentioned, broken the back of the insurgency. We've taken away this safe haven," he said.

Sattler's conclusion was far more optimistic than an assessment made shortly before the offensive by Marine intelligence officers, who said the insurgency would rebound if U.S. troop levels in the area were significantly reduced after the offensive.

Sattler cautioned, however, that insurgents remained a threat. A group attacked U.S. Marines and Iraqi government forces from a house inside Fallujah on Thursday, killing one Marine and one Iraqi soldier, Sattler said. One Marine and one Iraqi soldier also were wounded.

Sattler said the total U.S. death toll so far in the Fallujah offensive, which began Nov. 7, stands at 51, with about 425 wounded in action.

U.S. and Iraqi forces arrested 104 suspected guerrillas in an insurgent neighborhood in central Baghdad, including nine who are believed to have fled Fallujah, Interior Ministry spokes-man Sabah Khadim said. Most were Iraqis, although Syrians and non-Iraqi Arabs were among the group, he said.

Also, insurgents detonated a car bomb near a U.S. military convoy in Baghdad and a roadside bomb exploded at a job recruiting center in the northern city of Kirkuk in attacks that killed a total of four people and wounded eight, police and officials said.

Insurgents also fired 10 mortar rounds at the provincial administration offices in the northern city of Mosul, wounding four of the governor's guards, authorities said. Gov. Duraid Kashmoula was unhurt in the attack, spokesman Lt. Col. Paul Hastings said.

The rest of Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city with more than 1 million residents, remained calm for a second day since the U.S.-led offensive operation began Tuesday to wrest control of the western part of the city from insurgents.

Last week, gunmen stormed police stations, bridges and political offices, overwhelming police forces who, in many places, failed to even put up a fight. Some officers also allegedly cooperated with insurgents.

The U.S. military said as many as 2,500 U.S. and Iraqi troops met "little resistance" during operations to re-secure police stations and key bridges in Mosul from the insurgents.

Iraqi authorities have acknowledged that al-Zarqawi, along with other Fallujah insurgent leaders, escaped from the rebel bastion west of Baghdad where he was based before American troops moved in.

Early Thursday, U.S. troops encountered intense rocket-propelled grenade attacks in Fallujah, said Lt. Col. Pete Newell, a commander in Task Force 22, 1st Infantry Division. The Americans returned heavy fire.

Afterward, troops walked through the area, which contained dozens of destroyed buildings and fox holes where they believed insurgents fled when the bombing in the area started.

Some of the papers found by U.S. soldiers in the building bore Saddam Hussein's picture. A ski mask also was found.

Several dead bodies were on the premises, and a giant crater was seen outside the severely damaged building.

In a separate raid of a nearby building, American forces found a sport utility vehicle with a Texas registration sticker that was being converted into a car bomb.

The SUV was sitting in a warehouse surrounded by several bags of sodium nitrate, which is used to make explosives. The vehicle had no license plate, but some 15 license plates were inside.

Relief organizations estimate that up to 250,000 Iraqis have fled Fallujah and could need help in nearby villages and in Baghdad, said Astrid van Genderen Stort, spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Amman.

There are no independent figures on how many were killed in more than a week of fighting between U.S.-led forces and insurgents in Fallujah, home to about 300,000 people, she said.

About 10 major relief organizations held an emergency meeting in Amman on Thursday to plan how to help civilians affected by the fighting, Van Genderen Stort said.

While U.S. and Iraqi forces have retaken insurgent strongholds in Fallujah and Mosul, violence continues to erupt in Sunni Muslim-dominated areas of Iraq.

The Iraqi government, meanwhile, warned that Islamic clerics who incite violence will be considered to be "participating in terrorism," and it said a number of them already have been arrested.

Thair al-Naqeeb, a spokesman for Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, did not specify how many clerics have been detained.

In the past two weeks, a number of Sunni Muslim clerics in Baghdad and other cities -- including several members of the influential Association of Muslim Scholars -- have been arrested by U.S. and Iraqi forces.

The group, considered the most powerful Sunni religious group in the country, had publicly criticized the U.S. assault against Fallujah and promised to boycott national elections in January in protest.

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Associated Press Military Writer Robert Burns in Washington contributed to this report.