US and Iraqi troops swept into towns along the Euphrates river valley on Saturday in a push to flush out insurgents, and the government said it was closing in on al Qaeda's leader in Iraq , Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.As politicians haggled in Baghdad over who will get which posts in the new government, US Marines and Iraqi soldiers fought militants in the towns of Haditha and Ramadi, capital of the vast and often lawless western province of Anbar. Some intelligence reports have suggested Jordanian militant Zarqawi, who has claimed responsibility for many of the deadliest attacks in the country who has a $25 million US bounty on his head, has been hiding in the Haditha area. The Iraqi government said on Friday it had captured one of his senior aides, Abu Qutaybah, close to the border with Syria, and has vowed to get Zarqawi himself. "We are at the closest point to Zarqawi," Iraq's minister of state for national security, Kassim Daoud, said on Saturday. Iraq's government has said several times it was close to capturing Zarqawi.
Troops in tanks and armored cars stormed Haditha in the middle of the night, blowing up a weapons cache and exchanging small arms fire with guerrillas. But if militants were holed up there, they appeared to have fled and resistance was light. In Ramadi, witnesses reported fierce gun battles between US troops and insurgents. One said a US armored Humvee was destroyed, although this could not be confirmed. A hospital official said at least three people were killed and 17 injured.
Anbar province, which accounts for nearly a third of Iraq's area and stretches from Baghdad to the western borders with Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia, has long been a thorn in the side of troops trying to stamp out the insurgency. Militants have effective control of some towns and villages, and the US military acknowledged this week the security situation in the province had deteriorated too far. Since they launched the River Blitz offensive six days ago, US and Iraqi troops have arrested around 150 suspected insurgents and seized bomb-making equipment and weapons including machine guns, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades.
The extent to which Anbar lies beyond the pale of Iraqi authority was shown by last month's election, when only two percent of the province's mostly Sunni Muslim population voted. Some Sunni Arabs boycotted the ballot, others said the violence made voting simply too dangerous. As a result, Sunni Arabs fared badly in the polls and Iraq's long-oppressed Shi'ite majority prospered at their expense.
But neither the main Shi'ite coalition which topped the polls, nor the other Shi'ite party of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, has the two-thirds parliamentary majority needed to form a government and will have to cut deals to get what they want. The beneficiaries could be the Kurds, whose main coalition won 25 percent of the vote and will have 75 seats.
Since the election, the number of insurgent attacks in Iraq has fallen, although the country is still plagued by violence. Gunmen opened fire on two Ministry of Trade trucks between the southeastern city of Kut and Baghdad, killing two drivers, police said. Two Iraqi soldiers were killed and nine wounded when a suicide bomber attacked their checkpoint near Musayyib, south of Baghdad, police sources said. Three cars were set ablaze. A car bomb killed two civilians and injured three in western Baghdad on Saturday. Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the bomb, saying its suicide bomber had attacked two US tanks. Another car bomb went off in the restive northern city of Mosul, close to a US convoy, witnesses said. The US military had no immediate word on casualties.