Bombing of Convoy Kills 2 U.S. Soldiers, Iraqi Aide

BAGHDAD —  Two U.S. soldiers and an Iraqi translator were killed Monday when the convoy they were riding in hit a roadside bomb near a staunchly anti-American neighborhood of the capital, officials said.

With Monday’s deaths, the number of American soldiers killed by hostile fire since the Bush administration declared an end to major combat on May 1 surpassed the 200 mark. Monday’s casualties were also the second and third U.S. deaths under enemy attack since the capture of Saddam Hussein on Dec. 13.

Two other soldiers in the convoy, which belonged to the 1st Armored Division, were injured in the blast near the Adhamiya neighborhood of northern Baghdad, a Sunni Muslim stronghold where many people support Hussein.

Roadside bombs are a crude but effective weapon for insurgents battling the U.S.-led occupation. Overall, however, the rate of U.S. casualties has decreased significantly since November, when an average of nearly four GIs a day were killed.

U.S. troops continued a sweep across much of Sunni-dominated central Iraq in search of insurgents. At times using battering rams and explosives, the troops have conducted house-to-house searches and rounded up hundreds of Iraqis.

Military officials said the most recent detainees included a former general with Hussein’s intelligence service, Mumtaz Taji.

Authorities said they thought Taji, taken from his home in Baqubah, about 30 miles north of Baghdad, was directing some guerrilla operations and recruiting ex-soldiers to join cells.

L. Paul Bremer III, the top official in the U.S. occupation authority here, reiterated Monday that intelligence gleaned in Hussein’s capture had aided the pursuit of insurgents.

“We have been arresting quite a number of his cronies and colleagues, including one last night,” Bremer told NBC-TV. “We are getting some very useful opportunities in the last week or 10 days now to wrap up the leaders of the troops that are attacking our soldiers.”

Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, following President Bush on Thanksgiving and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar on Saturday, made a surprise visit to Iraq on Monday to visit the 2,350 Polish troops deployed as part of a multinational force south of Baghdad near Babylon.

Iraqi newspapers, meanwhile, reported that the betrayal of Hussein by an informant has triggered a spasm of tribal bloodletting in his ancestral home of Tikrit.

According to these accounts, which could not immediately be confirmed, local suspicion fell on one of Hussein’s bodyguards and close confidante, Col. Mohammed Muslit. Though Muslit has vanished, the reports said, his brother and the brother’s wife and their four children were slain in revenge.

U.S. military officials have not revealed the name of the man who led them to Hussein’s hide-out, but they have released a description that might be recognizable to some Iraqis within the tightknit tribal network.

Another paper, Azzaman, reported that two of Hussein’s aides who ferried food to him were found dead near the farmhouse where the former president was captured. The paper did not say how they died.

Townspeople suspected the two of turning in their boss to the Americans, and their tribe refused to give them a proper burial, the paper reported.