The top U.S. commander in Iraq said yesterday his counteroffensive will soon focus more on foreign terrorists, whom some officials believe are taking part in the killing of American soldiers.
“It’s an issue that I’m paying a little bit more attention to as we continue with this effort,” Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez told reporters in Baghdad. “And as the days go by, you’ll continue to hear us talk and focus on foreign fighters. And we have pretty significant evidence that there are foreign fighters here.”
Gen. Sanchez spoke just hours after 11 persons were killed at the Jordanian Embassy by a car bomb — a signature method used by al Qaeda and other Islamic terror groups to kill civilians.
“I think what this shows is that, in fact, we’ve got some terrorists that are operating here,” the three-star Army general said. “It shows that we’re still in a conflict zone.”
At the Pentagon, an official said that an al Qaeda-linked group, Ansar al-Islam, is definitely operating inside Iraq against coalition forces. But neither Gen. Sanchez nor the Pentagon named a specific suspect in yesterday’s deadly bombing.
It was the most extensive attack on a “soft target” in Iraq since the occupation began April 9. The resistance — a hodgepodge of foreign and indigenous terrorists, Saddam Hussein loyalists and former Iraqi military personnel — are turning more to attacks on civilians. Some officials view the move as an act of desperation as Gen. Sanchez’s troops capture more of the enemy and their weapons.
The Pentagon has declined to estimate how many guerrilla fighters remain in Iraq or to estimate how many foreign fighters are in the country. Officials said there are fighters who appear to be al Qaeda operatives, or “al Qaeda look-alikes.”
A U.S. intelligence official labeled the number of foreign enemies as “moderate” and said there is no large influx of such fighters into Iraq.
“The business of policing up the weapons left behind by the Iraqi army is massive,” Gen. Sanchez said. “It is probably one of the largest captured enemy-ammunition and enemy-equipment problems that the world has seen, definitely bigger than anything that has been seen in the last 60 years.”
As an example, he said the coalition has found 70 S-2 antiaircraft missiles positioned inside Baghdad. He said special teams have been brought in to conduct the “very volatile, complex procedures” of defusing and defueling the systems.
At the Pentagon, Lt. Gen. Norton Schwartz, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said an ongoing operation called Victory Bounty has captured 70 Fedayeen fighters, including top commanders. The 150,000 American troops in Iraq are conducting nearly 2,000 patrols a day, some with 33,000 Iraqi police now authorized by the coalition, he said.
Gen. Schwartz said the U.S. plan is to have Iraqis — not Americans — guard foreign embassies in Baghdad, as well as power and water lines targeted by Saddam loyalists.
About yesterday’s bombing, he said, “I think it is interesting that this clearly was an action targeted at innocents. And we have, obviously, the presence of terrorists in Iraq, along with the Ba’athists that have resisted us, and foreign fighters and so on.”
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