At least 10 people have been killed and 11 kidnapped in Iraq as the interim government claimed that the noose was tightening on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the man blamed for much of the violence.Three Iraqis died and 15 were wounded in clashes between gunmen and US marines in the rebel bastion of Ramadi, west of Baghdad. Hospital doctor said the casualties occurred during fighting that lasted several hours in the town centre, around 17 July Street.
In a catologue of other violence, witnesses and security sources said two people died in a bomb blast on Saturday near the headquarters of Iraq's leading Sunni Muslim religious organisation. Three Iraqi women died when mortar rounds struck homes near Dhuluiyah and a Turkish driver burnt to death in the cab of his lorry hit by an anti-tank rocket. In another attack, carried out with a car bomb, an Iraqi soldier died and five were wounded at Mussaieb, south of Baghdad.
Near Hilla, also south of the capital, a journalist with a US-funded Arabic language television station, Al-Hurra, was seriously wounded and his driver killed. "The Al-Hurra car was attacked by gunmen, the driver killed, and journalist Mohammed Sherif Ali was badly wounded," police Lieutenant Thamer Sultan said.
Meanwhile, police said 11 people, including four women, a policeman and two civil servants, have been kidnapped in a string of abductions since Friday in the area south of Baghdad known as the "triangle of death". Gunmen snatched the four women in four separate incidents in the towns of Latifiyah and Mahmudiyah on Friday. Two of them had been travelling back with their families from pilgrimage to the Shiite Muslim holy city of Karbala when they were ambushed on the road.
Saturday's violence rumbled on a day after four US soldiers and 13 Iraqis were killed, with a group linked to Zarqawi claiming responsibility for the attack that killed three of the US soldiers.
A pamphlet handed out north of Baghdad, signed by the Omar al-Hadid Brigade, said "Tarmiya was the tomb of dozens of their soldiers who were given a lesson that they will never forget." It pledged yet more "painful strikes" against the US Army in the coming five days.
But in the Shiite Muslim pilgrimage city of Najaf, national security chief Kassem Daoud told reporters: "We are really close to Zarqawi." Twenty-four hours earlier, the government announced the latest arrest of a man it described as a top aide to Zarqawi—one of a series of recent arrests it said were of people close to the Al Qaeda frontman in the country. "Security forces in Iraq conducted a raid in Anah on February 20 resulting in the capture of Talib Mikhlif Arsan Walman al-Dulaimi, aka Abu Qutaybah, a trusted lieutenant of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi," a government statement said.