Iraq Watch: November 21, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Forensic tests are currently being conducted to determine if one of the eight people killed in a U.S.-led raid Saturday night in the northern city of Mosul was in fact al-Qaida in Iraq's leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

At this point most officials are stating that the dead did not include the wanted Jordanian-born militant. The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, was quoted as saying, "Unfortunately, we did not get him in Mosul." White House spokesman Trent Duffy said that reports of al-Zarqawi's death were "highly unlikely and not credible."

Speculation regarding the possible death of a high-ranking insurgent leader, possibly including al-Zarqawi himself, spread Sunday with word of the intense firefight that broke out late Saturday after U.S. and Iraqi forces surrounded a two-story house in eastern Mosul's largely Kurdish Hay al Sokkar neighborhood. Three of the house's occupants blew themselves up causing the structure to collapse. This type of fierce resistance, including the use of suicide bomb vests, has historically indicated that a high-ranking person(s) was on the premise.

Elsewhere in Iraq Monday, U.S. forces mistakenly fired on and killed between three and five Iraqi civilians near Baqouba, 35 miles west of the capital. U.S. spokesman Maj. Steven Warren called the accident "one of these regrettable, tragic incidents."

In the nearby town of Kanan, a roadside bomb exploded next to a U.S. military convoy killing five civilians and wounding 12 others. Separately, shootings in Baghdad killed three people, including an Iraqi policeman.

Also, four Iraqi policemen were killed in a shooting north of Baghdad, in Tarmiyah and in the southern, predominately-Shiite city of Basra, gunmen killed Khalil Ibrahim, a member of the influential Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS).

In another development, representitives of Iraq's Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds meeting in the Egyptian capital of Cairo on Monday agreed that "resistance was a legitimate right for all people" although "terrorism does not represent resistance." The various religious and ethnic sects, according to the AP, also called for the "withdrawal of foreign troops according to a timetable, through putting in place an immediate national program to rebuild the armed forces ... control the borders and the security situation." The three-day conference was organized by the Arab League.

Late Monday, in a separate political development, Shiite leader Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, announced that he would pursue a federal region in southern Iraq following the December 15 elections. Al-Hakim, a Shiite, is head of the most powerful political block in Iraq, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). The issue of autonomous federal states was largely ignored or bypassed in Iraq's draft constitution, due to its divisiveness.