Baghdad, Iraq – U.S. and Iraqi forces have captured a top al-Qaeda in Iraq leader who ordered the bombing of a Shiite Muslim shrine in Samarra that triggered a wave of ferocious sectarian killings, Iraqi officials said Sunday.
The arrest of Hamed Jumaa Faris Juri al-Saeedi, described by officials as the No. 2 leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, was the latest in a series of blows to the Sunni Arab insurgent group, believed responsible for numerous suicide attacks on civilians and other deadly violence. The group’s former leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed by U.S. forces in June and replaced by Abu Ayyub al-Masri.
“The al-Qaeda organization in Iraq has been seriously weakened and is now suffering from a leadership vacuum,” Iraq’s national security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, said at a news conference. Twenty senior al-Qaeda in Iraq fighters have been captured or killed within the past few weeks based on information from al-Saeedi since his arrest, Iraqi officials said.
The Mujaheddin Shura Council, an insurgent coalition that includes al-Qaeda in Iraq, denied al-Saeedi was a member of al-Qaeda. A leader of another group in the council, however, confirmed that al-Saeedi belonged to al-Qaeda.
“But he is not that famous or any sort of leader,” Abu Abdullah, a leader of the Islamic Army of Iraq, said in a phone interview from Salahuddin province. “He is only a normal fighter.”
Iraqi officials said al-Saeedi, a former intelligence officer for Saddam Hussein, was captured within the past few weeks as he hid among women and children in an unspecified location just north of Baghdad. Al-Saeedi, who is in his early 40s, confessed he had joined al-Qaeda three years ago and is being held by U.S.-led coalition forces, the officials said.
In an attempt to thrust Iraq into a full-scale civil war, al-Saeedi supervised Haitham al-Badri, an al-Qaeda operative under his command, in carrying out the Feb. 22 bombing of a revered golden-domed Shiite shrine in Samarra, officials said. That attack sparked brutal reprisal killings by both Shiites and Sunnis that have left thousands of people dead.
“Why did you kill hundreds of people?” al-Saeedi was asked during a recent interrogation, according to Ali al-Dabbagh, an Iraqi government spokesman.
“What do you mean ‘hundreds of people’? I’ve killed thousands,” he was said to have responded.
If the Iraqi government’s depiction of al-Saeedi is accurate, he would be the highest-ranking al-Qaeda figure killed or captured since June 7, when U.S. forces killed al-Zarqawi by dropping two 500-pound bombs on his hideout north of Baghdad.
A senior U.S. military official said al-Saeedi was “one of the top five al- Qaeda in Iraq leaders” but declined to identify him as the second-highest official in the group. He spoke on condition of anonymity because the Geneva Conventions could be construed as forbidding the public discussion of detainees.
In a statement posted on the wall of the al-Tameem Mosque near Ramadi, where there is strong support for al-Qaeda, the Shura Council attacked government officials and denied that al-Saeedi, also known as Abu Humam or Abu Rana, was an al-Qaeda member.
“We swear to God, this is from their sick minds in an attempt to make the people believe a fake victory,” the statement said. “It is no more than names from their imagination and the devils whispering to them in the Green Zone.”
In an interview after his news conference, al-Rubaie dismissed the statement and said al-Saeedi told interrogators he had fought to replace al- Zarqawi but lost out to al-Masri. Al-Rubaie also said al-Saeedi had admitted to overseeing al-Qaeda operations in Baghdad and Diyala and Salahuddin provinces.
After authorities finish interrogating him, al-Saeedi will face charges including “mass killings of Iraqis,” al-Dabbagh said.
