Knight Ridder Newspapers

By Drew Brown and Nancy A. Youssef

BAGHDAD, Iraq – The U.S. death toll in Iraq reached 2,500 on Thursday as American forces remained locked in a bitter fight against insurgents and foreign terrorists.

The Pentagon also reported that 18,940 U.S. service members have been wounded in the war to topple Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, which began more than three years ago and has left tens of thousands of Iraqis dead.

Meanwhile, an American general said coalition forces had killed 104 insurgents in 452 raids since terrorist chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed June 7 in a U.S. bombing raid.

Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, a coalition spokesman, said the name of the man whom the American military had identified as Zarqawi’s successor, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, probably is another name for Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, the man whom a Web posting Monday by the group al-Qaida in Iraq named as the successor.

Both names probably are aliases. Abu means “father of” in Arabic, and al-Masri means “the Egyptian.” The other name, al-Muhajer means “the emigrant.”

Al-Masri is an Egyptian who joined Islamic Jihad in 1982, a terrorist group formed by al-Qaida No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri. Masri went to Afghanistan in 1999, where he became an expert in making car bombs, Caldwell said.

Though it’s unclear when they met, al-Masri and al-Zarqawi trained together at al Farouq in Afghanistan, Caldwell said, a terrorist training camp operated by Osama bin Laden.

Al-Masri made his way to Iraq after the fall of the Taliban in 2001 and is thought to have fought U.S. forces during the siege of Fallujah in 2004. He later operated an al-Qaida cell in Baghdad and was known as the “emir of southern Iraq,” Caldwell said.

He said al-Masri probably would continue the tactics his predecessor had used. American military forces blamed the Jordanian-born al-Zarqawi for suicide bombings, beheadings and sectarian killings meant to provoke civil war between Iraq’s majority Shiite Muslims and minority Sunni Muslims, from whom the insurgency draws most of its support.

“Nothing indicates to us that he will do differently, because he has been in this country for over three to four years now,” Caldwell said. “For him to make a change, there is nothing that shows or reflects that he would do that.”

Caldwell said coalition forces would continue to try to eliminate al-Qaida in Iraq by going after its midlevel leaders.

With a nightly curfew in effect and tens of thousands of Iraqi and U.S. troops on the streets of Baghdad, a new security crackdown announced by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki appeared to have curbed violence. No car bombs were reported in Baghdad on Thursday, a rare occurrence in the Iraqi capital, but it remained unclear what long-term effect the tighter measures would have.

Similar crackdowns in Baghdad, including Operation Thunder, launched in May 2005, haven’t ended insurgent attacks and suicide bombings.

Iraqi police reported that unidentified gunmen had shot and killed 10 Shiites after pulling them off a bus Thursday near Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad.

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The mixed Sunni-Shiite area, which has been the scene of numerous sectarian killings and fierce fighting between American troops and insurgents, isn’t far from where the U.S. airstrike killed Zarqawi.

Asked earlier this week to comment on the significance of the 2,500 American deaths in Iraq, Army Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, the deputy director of regional operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said it was important to remember that behind each of those deaths was an individual.

“And those individuals are those to whom we should be very, very grateful, and to their families,” Ham said Wednesday, during a Pentagon briefing.

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(Brown reported from Washington, Youssef from Baghdad.)

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(c) 2006, Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

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GRAPHIC (from KRT Graphics, 202-383-6064): 20060615 Al Masri bio

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AP-NY-06-15-06 1759EDT

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