U.S. kills 2 al-Qaida leaders

BAGHDAD AND CAIRO — In a succession of intelligence breaks, the United States says it has killed two key members of al-Qaida in Iraq in recent days, including the organization's No. 2 man, Abdullah Abu Azzam, who is suspected of orchestrating a series of suicide bombings in Baghdad since April.

According to American military officials, the United States has either made key arrests or developed informants who have led to a cascade of actionable intelligence over the past month. Since the middle of August, the United States has reported killing or capturing at least 16 members of al-Qaida in Iraq, led by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

How big a blow this is to the insurgency in Iraq remains unclear. While U.S. human intelligence has clearly improved, no one has a clear understanding of the internal workings of Zarqawi's network, which is thought to be only a small portion of Iraq's decentralized and highly complex insurgency.

"By itself these events don't do much to destroy al-Qaida as much as undermine and undercut it. But this comes after some very successful operations in Tal Afar that wrapped up the al-Qaida network there," says Anthony Cordesman, a former senior intelligence analyst for the United States and now an expert on the Iraq insurgency at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

The United States says it killed the insurgent leader of the town of Karabilah at 1:30 a.m. on Tuesday, and Azzam, said to be the al-Qaida leader (or emir) of Anbar Province, in a raid in Baghdad on Sunday. Meanwhile Gen. Kevin Bergner told reporters that in northern Iraq, where the United States recently fought a major engagement in Tal Afar and where major operations have also been carried out in Mosul, the United States has made inroads against the organization.

"We are probably at the point of impacting about 80 percent of that network in terms of detaining, capturing, killing the leadership, and disrupting their resources, and disrupting their support bases and neutralizing their capability," Gen. Kevin Bergner told reporters.

An Iraqi government spokesman said Abu Azzam, who's real name is Abdullah Najim Abdullah Mohamed al-Jawari, was an Iraqi. He was on a list of Iraq's 29 most-wanted insurgents issued by the US military in February and had a bounty of $50,000 on his head.

Cordesman says that Abu Azzam was a major figure in al-Qaida in Iraq and his death followed recent improvements in U.S. intelligence gathering and targeting of al-Qaida leaders. But predicting the real dividends is difficult. "We don't know how many leaders there are, how many experienced cadres there are, how many replacements there are," he says.