Marines from the 1st Battalion 23rd Marines prepare their weapons in Haditha, west of Baghdad. The 1st Marine Division of the I Marine Expeditionary Force and Iraqi Security Forces kicked off Operation River Blitz, aimed to enhance security in and around the western Iraqi al-anbar province and its capital the restive Sunni Muslim city of Ramadi.Jaime Razuri - (AFP)
BAGHDAD (AFP) - Iraqi security forces have killed or captured three insurgents producing websites showing hostages being tortured, officials said, as Indonesia stepped up efforts to try to free two of its journalists kidnapped in Iraq.
Time magazine meanwhile reported that rebel leaders had held secret talks with US officials seeking to end the deadly insurgency in which thousands of people have died since the US-led invasion ousted Saddam Hussein nearly two years ago.
Six more Iraqis were killed in separate incidents, police and the US military said on Sunday, after some 70 others died during the two-day Shiite Ashura religious festival which ended on Saturday.
The government said security forces had "killed the terrorist Adel Mujtaba, known as Abu Rim, who disseminated propaganda for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's terrorist network".
Mujtaba was the third Zarqawi propaganda chief to be killed or detained after the first and second in command, Abu Sufiyan and Husam Abdullah Muhsin al-Dulaymi, were respectively killed and detained, a statement said, without providing further details on the latter two.
"Abu Rim (Mujtaba) specialised in creating terrorist websites which encouraged terrorism," it said, adding that he was killed in a raid on February 11.
"He glorified the murder of innocent people and published images which included terrorists torturing hostages."
Zarqawi, who has a 25-million-dollar US bounty on his head, is believed to be behind a string of deadly attacks and kidnappings and is the frontman here for Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network.
Zarqawi's group is one of several in Iraq that have abducted foreigners, made videos of them pleading for their lives or being tortured or beheaded. The footage has then been displayed on websites or sent to television stations.
The latest foreigners to be kidnapped in Iraq, two Indonesian journalists, went missing last Tuesday near the rebel hotspot of Ramadi while driving from neighbouring Jordan to Baghdad.
Their abductors later sent a video to Al-Jazeera television showing the captives flanked by gunmen who demanded that Indonesia, which opposed the US-led invasion of Iraq, explain their presence in Iraq.
Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said Saturday the two journalists had no political agenda, while the mother of one of the hostages made an emotional appeal to her fellow Muslims to help secure her daughter's release.
"They are reporting on the activity of our brothers and sisters in Iraq because Indonesia, as the world's largest Muslim country, obviously wants to know how their brothers and sisters in Iraq are doing," said the president.
A Indonesian negotiator arrived in Amman on Sunday to try to seek the release of the two.
The hostages, Meutya Hafid, a reporter for Metro TV news channel, and cameraman Budiyanto, were being held by a previously unknown Islamist group, the Jaish al-Mujahedeen, or Army of Warriors, according to Al-Jazeera.
In an apparently unrelated development, the US military said it had increased security operations in the restive western province of Al-Anbar, of which Ramadi, near where the journalists were abducted, is the capital.
The US weekly Time reported that US officials had been in direct contact with representatives from Iraq's Sunni insurgency, to try to negotiate an end to attacks against US and Iraqi troops there.
Secret contacts with insurgent leaders are being conducted mainly by US diplomats and intelligence officers, Pentagon sources told Time in an article published on its website.
Although they have no immediate plans to halt their attacks on US troops, insurgents told the magazine that their aim is to establish a political identity to represent disenfranchised Sunnis and eventually negotiate an end to the US military's offensive in the so-called Sunni triangle.
Insurgent negotiators have told their US interlocutors that they would accept a UN peacekeeping force as the US troop presence recedes, Time wrote.
There were no immediate claims for most of the attacks that together left some 70 dead across Iraq Saturday and Sunday during the Asura festival.
But Sunni militants had vowed to target the Shiite community, which won a majority of the seats in the new parliament following Iraq's first democratic election in decades.
Sunni leaders on Sunday called on the Shiites not to exclude them from the political process, despite their boycott of, and subsequent poor showing in, last month's vote.
The results of the January 30 vote simultaneously confirmed the rise to power of Iraq's long-oppressed Shiite majority and the fall of the Sunni minority who had dominated under Saddam.
Negotiations to pick Iraq's new president and two vice presidents were due to resume on Monday after a break for Ashura, which marks the death 1,300 years ago of the Prophet Mohammed's grandson Hussein, an event which widened the split between Sunni and Shia Islam.
02-20-2005, 18h49 AFP
Copyright © 2004 Agence France Presse.
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