A close aide of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was captured yesterday – as Iraqi troops discovered a laboratory with manuals on manufacturing explosives and toxins.
Abu Saeed, a lieutenant of Zarqawi, Iraq’s most feared terrorist leader and an al Qaeda ally, was taken into custody in Mosul.
In Fallujah, Iraqi troops searching suspected terrorist hideouts discovered a laboratory with manuals on manufacturing explosives and toxins – including anthrax, Iraq’s national security adviser Qassem Dawoud said yesterday.
Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said U.S. troops, celebrating Thanksgiving after some of their bloodiest weeks in Iraq, should brace for more losses as they pursue guerrillas bent on wrecking an election scheduled for January.
Rumsfeld’s grim warning comes as the U.S. assault on the Sunni Muslim city of Fallujah has already made November the second deadliest month of the war for Americans, Pentagon figures show.
“No doubt attacks will continue in the weeks and months ahead, and perhaps intensify as the Iraqi election approaches,” Rumsfeld told reporters in Washington.
As 138,000 U.S. troops celebrated Thanksgiving with turkey dinners at bases across Iraq, Pentagon figures showed 109 service personnel have died there in the first 3½ weeks of the month.
Only this past April has seen more losses.
More than 50 Americans were killed attacking Fallujah.
In all, 1,230 American service people have died since the invasion of Iraq 20 months ago.
With time running out to quell rebellion among Saddam Hussein’s Sunni minority before the January vote, U.S., Iraqi and British forces seized 81 suspected rebels south of Baghdad, including at country villas used by Saddam’s old elite.
* A U.S. official said that Binghamton, N.Y., native James Mollen, 48, who worked with the Iraqi ministers of education and higher education, was shot dead.
Mollen, who moved to Washington before taking the job overseas last year, was planning to spend Christmas with his family in Binghamton, a local newspaper reported yesterday.
Mollen’s parents were told by the department their son was driving alone in his car after leaving the Ministry of Education when a gunman in another vehicle shot him in the head, the newspaper reported.
With Post Wire Services