The Iraqi Army said yesterday it had detained 70 suspected insurgents and freed 10 hostages in an operation launched five days ago in Muqadiyah in Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad. “Iraqi soldiers, supported by multinational forces, have succeeded over the past five days in capturing 70 wanted individuals,” Gen. Rahman Al-Janabi of the Iraq Army’s 5th division told reporters. “The objective is to clean up the area of insurgents.” He also said that 10 hostages held by militants were freed and that “extremist literature inciting sectarian violence” was found in their place of detention. Diyala province, considered part of Iraq’s agricultural heartland and with an explosive mix of Sunnis and Shiites, is one of the main fault lines in the country’s ongoing sectarian violence. It was also here that Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi was killed in a US airstrike on June 7.
On Friday, the commander of the 5th division, Maj. Gen. Ahmed Al-Awad, said he believed that a former high-level member of the ousted regime, Rasheed Taan, accused of commanding the insurgency in Diyala was hiding in the Muqdadiyah area. Taan, a former chairman of the ruling Baath partyÂ’s command in the western Al-Anbar province, is number six on a list of the 41-most wanted former regime loyalists and Islamist militants released by IraqÂ’s national security adviser Muwaffaq Al-Rubaie on Sunday. He carried a one-million-dollar bounty.
At least 368 prisoners held without charge in US-run detention centers were freed yesterday in the latest such releases under Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki’s national reconciliation plan. The detainees were released at a bus station in central Baghdad, an AFP correspondent witnessed. Since June 6, when the prime minister first floated his peace plan, nearly 3,000 detainees have been freed from coalition or Iraqi government custody. “Today, 368 prisoners will be released from various detention centers,” a Justice Ministry spokeswoman had told AFP earlier.