In a careening, high-speed shootout, insurgents tried to assassinate an Iraqi National Guard commander on Tuesday, a day after he identified a man in the custody of US troops as a high-ranking financier in the terrorist network of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
But the commander escaped as many as five assailants firing AK-47 rifles at him from two cars by speeding away on the wrong side of a highway and weaving through oncoming traffic. Eventually, the pickup truck he was riding in collided with a bystander's car, which was spun around on impact, blocked the road and absorbed the impact of at least one of the oncoming vehicles.
The commander, Colonel Mohamed Essa Baher, who leads the 507th Iraqi National Guard Battalion, then made a dash on foot to his nearby base with a stunned companion, Captain Ali Ahmed Abd. But in a measure of how organized the insurgents have become, by the time Baher emerged with reinforcements and set off in pursuit a few minutes later, the insurgents were gone.
The episode illustrated the overwhelming challenges faced by both US and Iraqi security forces in this dangerous patch of land some 32km south of Baghdad. Their opponents appear to be part crime family and part terrorist organization, with a highly developed intelligence gathering arm.
Baher was ambushed just as he was leaving for a meeting at the Ministry of Defense in Baghdad. A 43-year-old former officer in the Iraqi army who had already suffered through a rocket-propelled grenade attack on his house and the killing of his 16-year-old son, he said he would not relent. Through a translator, he vowed to pursue the terrorists "to the last breath."
Captain Guillermo Rosales, a US Marine officer who is helping to train the security forces here, said there were reports that the attackers had backup cars.
"If that is true, it was a set attempt," Rosales said. "They knew what time he was leaving."
On Monday, when Baher was called in to see several Iraqi detainees at a Marine base here, he immediately identified one of the men as Mahmood Abdel Aziz al-Harami al-Janabi, a paymaster in the al-Zarqawi network, with strong family ties to insurgents in Fallujah.
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