____________________________________________________________________________________________
Iraq detains 1,000 in anti-al-Qaida crackdown
Staff and agencies
By LEE KEATH, Associated Press Writer 3 minutes ago
BAGHDAD - Nearly 1,000 people have been detained in a sweep to break al-Qaida in Iraq‘s sway in Iraq‘s third largest city, Mosul, but many of the fighters have fled to nearby areas, where troops are hunting for them, Iraqi officials said Saturday.
But the flight of al-Qaida fighters raises the concern they can regroup elsewhere, as has often happened in the past.
"Operations will continue and the Iraqi army will not leave Mosul until security and stability have been accomplished," he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.
The sweep was launched Thursday, after five days of preparatory operations and arrests in the city. U.S.-backed Iraqi police and soldiers have been conducting raids on homes and have fanned out with checkpoints on city streets, though no clashes have been reported in the city, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad.
The assault on the Sunni al-Qaida in Iraq group was launched in the wake of two other major crackdowns against Shiite militiamen in the southern city of Basra and the Baghdad district of Sadr City in the past two months. Those two sweeps continue but uneasy truces with the powerful Shiite Mahdi Army militia have eased the heavy violence they sparked.
Al-Bolani told a gathering of some 300 former Saddam Hussein-era officers in Mosul that the army and police would make room for them and that al-Maliki was urging them to return. Many in the crowd cheered the announcement.
On Friday, al-Maliki offered amnesty and cash to fighters in Mosul who surrender their weapons within the next 10 days. Al-Bolani said no one has surrendered any weapons yet and warned they had "no other choice" but to comply or face being targeted by security forces in the coming days.
The prime minister returned to Baghdad from Mosul — where he has been overseeing the crackdown — to meet with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who made a surprise visit to Iraq on Saturday.
She welcomed Iraq‘s progress in passing a budget as well as oil legislation, and a bill paving the way for the provincial elections in the fall that are expected to more equitably redistribute power among local officials.
Pelosi, who also traveled to Iraq in January 2007 shortly after the Democrats assumed congressional control, has been a sharp critic of the Bush administration‘s conduct of the war and has pressed for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country this year.
She also has called for the Iraqi government to contribute more money to the reconstruction of the country.
President Bush‘s Iraq war funding request failed in the House on Thursday as anti-war Democrats and Republicans unhappy about added domestic funding formed an unlikely coalition to kill, for now, $163 billion to support U.S. troops overseas.
In violence Saturday, a female suicide bomber blew herself up near an office for a U.S.-allied Sunni group, then a suicide car bomber struck an Iraqi police patrol heading to the scene in the Diyala provincial capital of Baqouba, northeast of Baghdad.
Police said at least 15 people were wounded in the attacks, including two children.
___
Associated Press writers Hamid Ahmed and Sinan Salaheddin in Baghdad contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press. All rights
reserved.