Dozens of suspects held in Iraq sweep

BAGHDAD, Iraq – American and Iraqi troops pushing through a desolate area of Iraq’s Sunni Arab heartland rounded up dozens more suspected insurgents, including alleged killers of a television journalist, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Saturday.

The three-day-old sweep through villages 60 miles north of Baghdad stirred growing unease among leading Sunnis. One called it a needless “escalation” at a time of difficult negotiations over forming a broad-based government representing all of Iraq’s communities.

In Baghdad, meanwhile, a dozen more bodies were found as a shadowy war of Shiite-Sunni reprisals went on. And Shiite Muslim pilgrims heading to the holy city of Karbala again came under attack, with a roadside bomb killing one and wounding five.

In a U.S. radio address the day before the third anniversary of the U.S.-British invasion, President Bush said the violence in Iraq “has created a new sense of urgency” among Iraqi leaders to form such a government.

In the counterinsurgency sweep, through a 100-square-mile area of semidesert northeast of the Tigris River town of Samarra, Iraqi soldiers and units of the 101st Airborne Division had detained about 80 suspected insurgents as of Saturday, said Lt. Col. Edward S. Loomis, a U.S. spokesman. Seventeen were released after questioning, he said.

Among those detained were six people, not further identified, allegedly responsible for the March 11 killing of Amjad Hameed, a journalist for the Iraqi television network al-Iraqiya, and his driver, the interim Iraqi government said.

The U.S. military reported that two 101st Airborne soldiers were killed Thursday by indirect fire – usually meaning mortars – at the Speicher operating base farther north up the Tigris. The deaths, which Loomis said were not directly related to the sweep, were the second and third involving division soldiers on the day Operation Swarmer began.