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Manhunt trails Iraqi violence

Market sellers clear up the debris after a mortar shell was fired at the Isterbadi market, killing at least four people and wounding 13, in the Baghdad suburb of Kazimiyah Saturday. (Associated Press / The Spokesman-Review)
Jonathan Finer Washington Post
Market sellers clear up the debris after a mortar shell was fired at the Isterbadi market, killing at least four people and wounding 13, in the Baghdad suburb of Kazimiyah Saturday. (Associated Press / The Spokesman-Review)

BAGHDAD, Iraq – U.S. and Iraqi forces conducted a sweeping hunt Saturday for two American soldiers missing after a clash with insurgents in Yusufiyah, south of Baghdad, raiding houses, scanning the scene from aircraft and deploying divers to search waterways.

One American soldier was killed in the incident, in which insurgents attacked a vehicle checkpoint in the restive Sunni Arab town just before 8 p.m. Friday. The names of the dead and missing soldiers are being withheld until their families can be notified, the military said.

The New York Times reported that Iraqi residents in the area said they saw two soldiers taken prisoner by a group of masked guerrillas. It said the two surviving soldiers were led to two cars and driven away.

“We are using all available assets, coalition and Iraqi – ground, air and water – to locate and determine the duty status of our soldiers,” Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, a U.S. military spokesman, said in a televised statement Saturday.

Before this week, only one U.S. soldier who went missing in Iraq remained unaccounted for. Sgt. Keith “Matt” Maupin was abducted April 9, 2004, after his convoy was attacked on Baghdad’s airport road. Insurgents later released a video that purported to show Maupin being shot dead, but the military deemed it inconclusive.

Word of the missing troops came as insurgents in and around Baghdad thwarted a heavy police and army presence by carrying out six attacks that killed at least 35 people, most of them Iraqi police and soldiers. In recent days, the capital has seen increased numbers of checkpoints, patrols and raids as part of a new security initiative from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government.

The deadliest attack Saturday came in the northern neighborhood of Zayouna, home to many former officers in Saddam Hussein’s army, where a suicide car bomber struck a joint Iraqi police and army checkpoint, killing 12 members of the security forces and wounding 22.

Seven other members of Iraq’s security forces were killed when a car bomb blasted a checkpoint near Iraq’s National Theater in the southern neighborhood of Karrada, police officials said. A car bomb at a checkpoint in checkpoint in Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad, also killed seven.

In the Shiite-majority neighborhood of Kazimiyah, northwest of downtown, three nearly simultaneous explosions rocked a crowded market early Saturday morning, killing a father and son and wounding 15 others, according to Ahmad Hussein, a doctor at nearby Kazimiyah Hospital.

The Mujaheddin al-Shura Council, an umbrella organization of insurgent groups that includes al-Qaida in Iraq, derided Maliki’s security initiative as a “media show” and promised more attacks in the coming days, in a statement posted on a Web site used by insurgents.