Five Female Detainees in Iraq Set Free

BAGHDAD —  Iraq’s minister of industry narrowly escaped an assassination attempt Thursday, and the release of five female prisoners by U.S. authorities raised hopes that kidnapped American reporter Jill Carroll would soon be set free.

Also Thursday, the U.S. military reported the deaths of a soldier and a Marine, and Army Gen. George W. Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, acknowledged in Diwaniya that U.S. forces overall were “stretched,” Associated Press reported. He was responding to journalists’ questions about an unreleased Pentagon study that found the military was overextended in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Iraqi minister, Usama Abdulaziz Najafi, was in a convoy on a main highway about 65 miles north of Baghdad when a roadside bomb exploded. The blast engulfed one of the cars in flames, killing three bodyguards and injuring one. The minister was unhurt.

The Iraq insurgency has targeted officials at all levels in its attempt to weaken Iraq’s emerging democratic government.

Hopes rose Thursday that Carroll, who was kidnapped Jan. 7 in Baghdad, might be released. On Jan. 17, her captors issued a videotape of the reporter and threatened to kill her unless all female prisoners held by American forces were released by Jan 20. Since then, there has been no word on the 28-year-old freelancer, who was working for the Christian Science Monitor.

The five female detainees freed Thursday were among 424 prisoners released by U.S. authorities. At a news briefing, Army Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch said the move was part of a “normal process and not as a result of demands by terrorists and criminals.”

An estimated 14,000 Iraqis, including four women, remain in U.S. military jails.

Local media quoted Iraqi officials as saying they were hopeful that the detainees’ release might persuade Carroll’s abductors to set her free. In a telephone interview, David Cook, the Christian Science Monitor’s Washington bureau chief, was guarded in his reaction to the U.S. move.

“We are aware of the release and watching carefully for positive developments,” he said.

Gen. Casey spoke to reporters during a trip to witness the hand-over of two provinces in south-central Iraq to the 8th Division of the Iraqi army. He said that although the U.S. military in Iraq was under stress, he thought the mission could be accomplished as staffed. He said he would order withdrawals only as Iraqi forces became capable of taking over operations.

On Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld disputed reports that the U.S. military was stretched thin in Iraq and Afghanistan. “This armed force is enormously capable,” he told reporters. “It’s battle-hardened.”

In other developments in Iraq, Baghdad police sources said the bodies of 10 blindfolded men had been found in water-holding tanks at a sewage treatment facility in a Baghdad suburb. All had been shot to death.

Meanwhile, cameraman Mahmoud Zaal of Baghdad TV was killed Wednesday while filming U.S. troops fighting insurgents in Ramadi. Sources said he initially was detained by American forces and later released, before being killed by gunfire.

At his regular Thursday briefing for reporters, military spokesman Lynch said insurgent attacks and other incidents had risen 26% across the country last week to 433, but that overall, violence was in decline.

As a result of “outreach,” he said, coalition forces are getting better cooperation from some Iraqi insurgents who are neither loyalists to former President Saddam Hussein nor linked to Al Qaeda, but are “rejectionists” alienated from the current government.

“By talking with them, explaining the business of being part of the solution and not part of the problem, many of them turn out to be individuals we can rely on to help make progress here in Iraq,” Lynch said. “There is indeed dialogue taking place.”

There were few details on the two slain U.S. troops, whose identities were being withheld pending notification of their families. The Marine was killed Tuesday by small-arms fire east of Fallouja. He was assigned to the 2nd Marine Division, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force.

The other was described as a soldier with the Multinational Division Baghdad who was killed Wednesday by a roadside bomb near the capital.

According to an Associated Press tally, at least 2,238 American service members have been killed since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.