This is the same man who once made the controversial announcement of arresting 270 al-Qaeda men back in January so I'll take his words with a grain of salt until some authority confirms his statement.
Sheikh Usama said today that the "Nakhwa" 4,000 man-strong tribal force he's supervising has succeeded in capturing yet another 169 infiltrators coming mostly from the Jordanian borders during the past week.
The sheikh also spoke of disbanding 9 terror groups working with Zaraqawi's al-Qaeda in Iraq and confirmed that the recently captured infiltrators were mostly non-Iraqi Arabs with some Iraqis guiding them in and providing logistics and that they brought weapons, explosives and sophisticated maps with them with a selection of targets pointed on those maps.
Our main problem is the vast size of Anbar as well as having shared borders with 3 countries; Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria and recently we have that more and more infiltrators are coming through the borders with Jordan rather than the other two countries…We have rid about 90% of the province of Zaraqwi's criminal thugs and we are coordinating our work with the ministries of defense and interior and we had several meetings with Iraqi officials as well as General Casey. Now we believe Zarqawi had escaped to Salahiddin province and we are cooperating with the tribes of Salahiddin to find out where this criminal is hiding.
A few days ago I read a short report on the al-Bayina al-Jadida newspaper that mentioned that Zarqawi had moved to the outskirts of Salahiddin and sought hide in the Himreen Mountains (these are technically hills lying Northeast of Salahiddin, southeast of Kirkuk and extend to the Iranian borders where they merge with Zagrus Mountains) for about a month before fleeing to Afghanistan through Iran.
Whether the information we got from paper and the sheikh are accurate or not, the authorities should do a better job in keeping us informed with as much information as possible.
I wouldn't mind unclassified!
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