ARAB-US RELATIONS - May 10 - US Readies New Raids Near Syria.

The chief of operations for the 2nd Marine Division Col Bob Chase, says insurgents who control parts of the western Iraqi desert appear to have fallen back to regroup as the Marines prepare a new assault on a force of more than 200 insurgents hiding or roaming the towns and desert in the remote areas just east of the Syrian border. He said: The enemy, as you expect, once you hit them hard they have a tendency to go to ground. There are some locations that we are waiting for the timing to be correct". The governor of Anbar Province, the Sunni Arab province that sprawls westward from Falluja, near Baghdad, to Qaim and Ubaydi in the Jazira Desert where the Marines are fighting, was kidnapped May 10 by gunmen who told his family he would be released when the US military pulled out of Qaim, news agencies reported. The governor, Raja Nawaf Farhan Al Mahalawi, was kidnapped while driving from Qaim to Ramadi. Kidnappers "demanded that American forces leave Qaim in order to release him", the governor's brother, Hammad, told The AP. The capture of the province's chief official would be a major propaganda coup for the rebels, but a Marine spokesman at the division's HQ's in the provincial capital of Ramadi said he could not confirm the accuracy of the reports. The apparent pause in the fighting along the Syrian border was accompanied by two car bombings in Baghdad on May 10. In one, a parked car packed with explosives detonated as a convoy of US and Iraqi troops drove along Sadoun Street in the heart of the capital's commercial district, killing at least 7 people and wounding 23, according to Interior Ministry officials. The attack occurred within 275 meters, of a suicide bombing on May 7 on the same street where 22 people were killed, including 2 US security contractors.

The US military command said that three of its soldiers were wounded in the latest attack, which witnesses said occurred as a convoy of Humvees and other armored vehicles drove up the street in midmorning. A survivor who was lightly wounded, Sadiq Mustafa, said he had seen a red Opel car parked near a sidewalk cafe. "The police asked what it was doing there, and we said we didn't know", Mustafa said. And then the American convoy drove by and the car exploded, he said. Later in the morning, a suicide bomber drove into the entrance of a police compound housing a boat unit that patrols the Tigris River opposite the Green Zone, the heavily fortified area on the river's west bank that is the base for Iraq's transitional government and the American Embassy. That attack, about five kilometers, or three miles, south of the earlier bombing, wounded three policemen, according to a police spokesman. On May 7, more than 1,000 US troops operating under a Marine regimental combat team supported by helicopter gunships and fighter jets swept into insurgent-controlled areas along the Euphrates River near Syria to root out foreign fighters and Baathists loyal to Saddam Hussein.

The Marines said after inflicting heavy casualties on the insurgents, they paused to gather intelligence for new attacks. But reporters embedded with Marine combat units said the US troops had encountered unexpectedly strong resistance, with fierce house-to-house fighting against sandbag-fortified insurgent positions. These reports said the insurgents had employed "baited attacks", detonating bombs and then shelling and shooting at US troops who rushed forward to the blast sites. One insurgent hiding in a basement killed a marine by firing up through a floor grate at troops entering the house. "They were clearly holding their ground", Col Stephen Davis, commander of the Marine regimental combat team, told The Los Angeles Times. The Marines say they crossed the Euphrates River around Ubaydi, about 180 miles north-west of Baghdad, and are now pushing west toward the Syrian border, fighting insurgents who have taken refuge in desert outposts or holed up in safe houses in the heavily Sunni towns along the Euphrates.

Many insurgents are believed to have pulled back to towns on the northern side of the river close to the border, Chase said. About 100 insurgents have been killed and at least 16 captured, the military said, with at least 3 marines killed. Military spokesmen have described many of the dead insurgents as members of the terrorist network led by Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant who is US most-wanted man in Iraq, whose group issued an Internet statement calling US claims of heavy enemy deaths "lies" and insisting that "our mujahedeen in Qaim are well".