60 detained in U.S.-led Swarmer offensive

CNN | March 18 2006

Iraqi police and soldiers found the bodies of 16 people in Baghdad on Saturday who were shot in the head and showed signs of torture, security forces said.

The bodies were found in six neighborhoods over the past 12 hours and could not be immediately identified.

In other developments Saturday, 60 people arrested in the U.S.-Iraqi military sweep north of Samarra remained in custody out of 80 who were initially detained, according to a spokesman for the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 101st Airborne Division. The 20 had been released.

The U.S. military said it had confiscated weapons in Operation Swarmer, but reported no casualties or firefights. (Watch what is being considered a 'quiet' operation -- 1:54)

The operation, which began at dawn Thursday with 1,500 U.S. and Iraqi troops, is targeting villages in a rural area of Salaheddin province, where insurgents are believed to be based, according to Iraqi security sources.

The region is sparsely populated farmland northeast of Samarra, where the Askariya Mosque, a Shiite shrine, was bombed last month. The February 22 attack set off a wave of Shiite reprisals and Sunni counter-reprisals that caused hundreds of deaths and strikes on mosques, sparking fears of full-blown civil warfare.

By Friday, the number of U.S. and Iraqi forces had decreased to 900.

The Pentagon has called it the largest air assault operation in Iraq since U.S.-led forces attacked -- exactly three years ago this coming Monday.

Pilgrims, Iraqi soldiers wounded
A roadside bomb exploded in southwestern Baghdad Saturday, as a group of Shiite pilgrims were walking south to Karbala, Baghdad emergency police said.

Nine pilgrims were wounded by the 8 a.m. blast, police said.

The pilgrims were observing the Shiite holy day of Arbaeen, the end of the 40-day period commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hussein. That day falls on Monday -- also the third anniversary of the war in Iraq.

At the same time, another roadside bomb in the eastern Baghdad neighborhood of Mustansriya exploded, wounding five Iraqi soldiers as their patrol was passing by, police said.

Two civilians were wounded in a separate car bomb attack in central Baghdad.

U.S. soldiers killed
Three U.S. soldiers assigned to the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, were killed Thursday in the north-central region of Iraq. They were not involved in Operation Swarmer, the U.S. military reported.

One was killed while manning an observation post in Samarra; the other two were killed in an indirect fire attack at Contingency Operating Base Speicher, northwest of Tikrit, the U.S. military said.

Another U.S. soldier was wounded in that second attack.

The deaths bring the number of U.S. troops killed in the war to 2,316, according to U.S. military reports.

Break in journalist's killing?
Six people detained during an Iraqi army operation in the Abu Ghraib area of western Baghdad have confessed to killing a top local journalist, an Iraqi Defense Ministry official told CNN Saturday.

Amjad Hamid Hassan, the director of the state-owned TV station Iraqiya, was killed, along with his driver, in a drive-by shooting last week in western Baghdad.

Two others are being sought in the killing, the official said.

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