U.S. Troops Hunt al-Qaida in Raids in Iraq

U.S. troops conducted nearly 40 raids Friday in Iraq, taking advantage of information gleaned from searches following Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's death, a military spokesman said, revealing new information about the man believed to be poised to take the terror leader's place.

U.S. troops conducted 39 raids across Iraq, including some directly related to the information they obtained from the strike against al-Zarqawi. Those were in addition to 17 raids conducted after the terror leader was killed Wednesday evening.

U.S. Maj. Gen. William Caldwell also said Egyptian-born Abu Ayyub al-Masri would likely take the reins of al-Qaida in Iraq, providing the full name of the militant for the first time. Al-Masri was named in a February 2005 announcement by the U.S. Central Command as a close associate of al-Zarqawi and had a $50,000 bounty placed on his head.

He said al-Masri and al-Zarqawi met each other for the first time at an al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan in 2001, but he said al-Masri came to Iraq before the Jordanian-born al-Zarqawi.

Al-Masri is believed to be an expert at constructing roadside bombs, the leading cause of U.S. military casualties in Iraq.

In the second night of raids, Caldwell said 39 raids were carried out and that "clearly we picked up things like memory sticks, some hard drives" that would allow American forces to begin dismantling al-Zarqawi's al-Qaida in Iraq. He said it was also helping them understand where the group's weapons and financing were coming from.

U.S. troops had carried out 17 simultaneous raids in the hours after al-Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. airstrike Wednesday near Baqouba, the capital of Diyala province. The region is in the heartland of the Sunni Arab-led insurgency and has seen a recent rise in sectarian violence. Baqouba is 35 miles northeast of Baghdad.

In announcing al-Zarqawi's death, Caldwell said the 17 raids had "produced a tremendous amount of information," which he described as a "treasure trove." He also said they waited to kill al-Zarqawi before carrying out the other raids, in an apparent effort not to spook the Jordanian-born terrorist.

"We had identified other targets that we obviously did not go after to allow us to focus on al-Zarqawi. Now that we got him, we will go after them," Caldwell said.