Good news from Iraq, as another key member of the Iraqi insurgency has been caught.
U.S. forces have arrested the alleged mastermind of last month’s assault on Abu Ghraib prison and the organizer of recent lethal car bombings in Baghdad, the Iraqi government and U.S. military said Sunday.
Amar Adnan Muhammad Hamzah Zubaydi, detained Thursday in an early morning raid on his home, was described as an associate of Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab Zarqawi, according to separate statements issued by the Iraqi government and U.S. military officials.
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Zubaydi allegedly planned the coordinated April 2 assault on Abu Ghraib prison that wounded 44 American troops and 13 detainees.
He also was allegedly responsible for a series of car bombings in Baghdad April 29, the day after Iraq’s new government was formally approved by the National Assembly. The bombings were part of a wave of insurgent violence across the country that day that killed at least 50 people, including three American soldiers.
According a former officer in Saddam Hussein’s army and a journalist with sources in the insurgency, Zubaydi is related to Muhammad Hamza Zubaydi, a top Hussein officials who was on the Pentagon’s most wanted list until his arrest in April 2003.
The former officer described the Hussein aide as Zubaydi’s uncle. He said the younger Zubaydi was a Baath Party official in charge of security in central Iraq and had helped put down an uprising by Shiite Muslims in southern Iraq in 1991. After the U.S. invasion, Zubaydi went to Syria, the officer said. When he returned to take part in the insurgency, he posed as a religiously motivated fighter, he added.
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The U.S. military statement also accused Zubaydi of planning the assassination of “a prominent Iraqi government official.” It added that he admitted providing explosives to the man responsible for more than 75 percent of all car bombings in Baghdad before his capture in mid-January.
I find it interesting to note, while willing to run the fruits of this man’s terrorist labors as its top stories, CNN chooses to relegate his capture to second billing. Instead, CNN chose to focus its watchful eye on the American casualty count in Iraq, which has reached 1,600. CNN — no sense of perspective but always there to rain on any American military parade.