As U.S. forces in Iraq faced hostile fire in the air and on the ground, raids in northern Iraq yielded several suspected terrorists, including some who might belong to the Al Qaeda terror network. Military sources in the field reported that members of Al Qaeda were among those rounded up by the 101st Airborne division near Mosul. But senior Defense officials at the Pentagon would not confirm that some of the captured were Al Qaeda. The 101st Airborne division was using lists of several people they were seeking; the raids conducted to seize those people were successful, Pentagon sources told Fox. But, the sources added, "they don’t carry membership cards" so it wasn’t immediately known whether or not they belong to Usama bin Laden’s terror network. And intelligence sources said they didn’t have information that any members of Al Qaeda were detained recently either. Other senior officials told Fox News there was some information that the detainees might be connected to Ansar al-Islam, which in turn has links to Al Qaeda. But since the data on the raids was still being analyzed, the officials said they couldn’t yet confirm the identities of those captured.
My own opinion is that the difference between the core network and the affiliates is basically one of semantics and it looks like the troops in the field seem to share that view. |