U.S. troops move to quell Mosul insurgency

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The U.S. military raced Tuesday to contain a spreading insurgency, sending hundreds of soldiers and armored vehicles into the streets of Mosul to root out bands of rebels who commandeered parts of the city last week as the Americans were battling their way through Falluja.

The struggle to retake Mosul came as the family of a kidnapped British-Iraqi aid worker, Margaret Hassan, said they believed that she was the woman shown being executed on a videotape sent to Al-Jazeera on Tuesday. Hassan was abducted in Baghdad last month as she drove to work. She would be the first foreign female hostage in Iraq to be executed.

A day after another videotape was aired by NBC News showing a U.S. Marine fatally shooting a wounded and apparently unresisting Iraqi prisoner in a Falluja mosque, commanders said they had removed the Marine from the battlefield and were investigating the incident. U.S. officials braced for a wave of outrage in the Middle East as news of the videotape spread around the world.

Though a weeklong U.S. offensive smashed the insurgents' haven of Falluja, snipers continued Tuesday to shoot at U.S. troops roaming the debris-covered streets. Residents began to warily step out of their homes, emerging into a wasteland devastated by U.S. bombs and bullets.

The U.S. offensive in Mosul, 225 miles north of Baghdad and Iraq's third-largest city, follows the tactical victory in Falluja and is aimed at driving insurgents from another stronghold.

U.S. and Iraqi troops sealed off the five bridges spanning the Tigris River and began blocking off western neighborhoods largely inhabited by Sunni Arabs, who ruled the country in the era of Saddam Hussein.

The provincial government imposed a curfew, and the main avenues appeared deserted for much of the day, witnesses said. The loudest noises came from mortar shells exploding near the U.S. forces and helicopters buzzing above rooftops and rows of palm trees.

"It's ongoing offensive operations to eliminate all the pockets of resistance that are out there," said Lt. Col. Paul Hastings, a spokesman for Task Force Olympia, the U.S. units charged with controlling northern Iraq. "Now we're trying to catch a wider swath of targeted areas."

The colonel said that U.S. forces had met little resistance and that groups of insurgents appeared to melt away at the approach of light-armored Stryker vehicles.

But the insurgents continued launching attacks throughout the city, firing at U.S. troops at police stations, lobbing mortars at U.S. bases, and aiming suicide car bombs at American troops.

Thousands of Kurdish militiamen have entered Mosul at the request of the provincial governor, a move that could increase ethnic tensions in the diverse city, which has large numbers of Kurds, Christians and Sunni Arabs. The governor has also called in Iraqi Army soldiers to help establish order where the police have failed. Residents said Tuesday that insurgents had used explosives to demolish at least two police stations, one of which had already been looted last week.

As U.S. troops battled insurgents in Mosul, the rebels continued their counteroffensive on Tuesday, with attacks across the Sunni Triangle in Baquba and Ramadi and bombings of oil pipelines near Kirkuk, to the north.

A U.S. soldier was killed and another wounded by a roadside bomb north of the capital, the U.S. military said. At least 1,198 U.S. troops have died in the war. The week ending Nov. 13 was the deadliest to date, with at least 65 U.S. soldiers and Marines killed, many during the offensive in Fallujah.

Iraqi officials also claimed success in flushing out some insurgent leaders, saying they had captured several leaders of the Army of Muhammad, believed to be responsible for several beheadings of Iraqis and foreigners.

Al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite news channel, reported Tuesday evening that it had received a videotape showing a gunman shooting dead a woman who was likely to be Hassan, the aid worker. It did not air the videotape.

Hassan's family and British officials said they had seen a video that led them to believe she was now dead.

"Our hearts are broken," Hassan's four brothers and sisters said in a statement released by the British Foreign Office. "We have kept hoping for as long as we could, but we now have to accept that Margaret Hassan has probably gone and at last her suffering has ended."

Hassan was the director of Iraq operations for CARE International and had lived in this country for more than 30 years. She was born in Dublin and received citizenship here after marrying an Iraqi man, Tahseen Ali Hassan. She joined CARE International in 1991, after the Persian Gulf War, and became an outspoken critic of the U.N. sanctions.

A group of armed men snatched her as she was driving to work last month. She was held by an unknown group that released four videos of her, each showing her in an increasingly distressed state. The last one, released on Nov. 2, showed Hassan fainting at one point and a gunman threatening to turn Hassan over to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant operating in Iraq, if Britain did not withdraw its forces within 48 hours.

"She dedicated her whole life to working for the poor and vulnerable, helping those who had no one else," her family said. "Those who are guilty of this atrocious act, and those who support them, have no excuses."

In a televised interview with the BBC, Tahseen Hassan pleaded with his wife's captors to give him definitive proof of her fate.

"I beg those people who have kidnapped Margaret to tell me what they have done with her," he said.

Until last month, when it suspended operations here following Hassan's kidnapping, CARE International distributed medical supplies to hospitals across Iraq and helped improve access to clean water.

Hassan's kidnapping and that of a British engineer, Kenneth Bigley, who was beheaded by Zarqawi's group in early October, have increased the political pressure on Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain. The war has been hugely unpopular in Great Britain, and the two kidnappings have led to widespread condemnation of British participation.