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| Iraq-Jordan |
| New bounties on suspects |
| 2004-02-10 |
| What we are willing to pay provides a look into who we think is the most dangerous: The US army placed new bounties on the heads of suspected insurgent leaders yesterday amid warnings that Islamist militants were poised to unleash a new wave of attacks in northern Iraq. The US army distributed a new poster offering a total of $16.5 million for the capture of the five most wanted men. It maintained at $10m the bounty on the head of Saddam Hussein’s right-hand man, Izzat Ibrahim Al Duri, but added $5m to that on alleged Islamist militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi, whose real name is Fadel Nazzal Al Khalayleh, is accused by the US-led coalition of acting as intermediary between Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network and Ansar Al-Islam, a militant group operating in northern Iraq. The poster, published in Arabic by the US 1st Armoured Division which patrols the Baghdad region, also offered $1m for a member of Saddam’s outlawed Baath party command, Mohammed Yunes Al Ahmad. Moving up, his mom will be proud. Numbers four and five on the list each have $250,000 bounties. They are Abdulbaki Abdulkarim Abdullah Al Saadun, the head of the Baath party military bureau in Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad, and Moamar Ahmad Yussef Al Jaber, of unspecified nationality, who is described as "the deputy of a terrorist chief." Zarqawi’s deputy, perhaps? The announcement of the new bounties came as the New York Times reported that Zarqawi might be deliberately fanning communal tensions between Iraq’s long oppressed Shiite majority and the ousted Sunni Arab elite in a bid to derail the coalition’s plans to hand over sovereignty by June 30. |
| Posted by:Steve |