Two Al Qaeda leaders killed in Iraqi-US operation

BAGHDAD - Two Al Qaeda leaders have been killed north of Baghdad after intelligence tracked them down, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told a press conference Monday.

Al-Maliki said, in remarks aired on state TV, that both Abu Ayyub al-Masri, Al Qaeda’s leader in Iraq, and Sheikh Abu Omar al-Baghdadi were killed in Salah al-Din province.

“The death of terrorism is an important step towards reconstruction,” al-Maliki said.

US forces in Iraq said in a statement that Iraqi and US security forces killed “the two most senior leaders of Al Qaeda in Iraq,” adding that an assistant of al-Masri and al-Baghdadi’s son were killed in the raid.

A further 16 suspects were arrested,the statement added. One soldier died during the assault when a US helicopter crashed.

Al-Masri was a senior aide to the former leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed in a US airstrike in 2006.

Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, was the shadowy leader of the Sunni Islamist insurgency in Iraq. Iraqi police announced that he had been arrested or killed several times before in 2007 and 2009.

After the 2007 reports turned out to be false, US Brigadier General Kevin Bergner told reporters that the US military believed al-Baghdadi did not exist, but was a myth created “to put an Iraqi face on the leadership of al-Qaeda in Iraq.”