US and Iraqi forces raid insurgent stronghold
Hundreds of US and Iraqi forces today launched their biggest Baghdad raid in recent weeks, moving on foot through a central neighbourhood and rounding up dozens of suspected insurgents, the military said.
About 500 members of Iraq’s police and army swept through buildings in the Rashid neighbourhood along with “several hundred” American soldiers, holding 65 suspected militants, Lt Col Clifford Kent of the US Army’s 3rd Infantry Division said.
One Iraqi soldier suffered injuries but no American casualties were reported in the largest joint raid in Iraq’s capital by US and Iraqi forces since the Fort Stewart, Georgia-based 3rd Infantry Division assumed responsibility for the city on February 27, said Kent.
One suspected insurgent was also being treated for wounds, the military said.
On Sunday, the family of a Pakistani embassy employee kidnapped in Baghdad appealed for his captors to release him, and al-Qaida’s ally in Iraq claimed to have kidnapped and killed a senior police official.
Malik Mohammed Javed, a consular and community affairs employee at Pakistan’s embassy, went missing in Baghdad on Saturday after leaving home to pray at a mosque, officials said.
The previously unknown Omar bin Khattab group claimed responsibility for his kidnapping and Javed called the embassy to say his abductors had not harmed him, Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
The kidnapping comes nine months after insurgents abducted and killed two Pakistanis working for a Kuwaiti company in Iraq. Their abductors had demanded that Pakistan promise not to send any troops to Iraq.
Pakistan, a key US ally in the war against terrorism, has refused to deploy peacekeepers and has urged its citizens to avoid travelling to Iraq.
