From today’s Bandar Beacon, aka The Washington Post:
BAGHDAD, April 28 — U.S. forces killed a local leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and captured another in raids north of Baghdad on Thursday and Friday, dealing a blow to the insurgent organization’s leadership in the violent city of Samarra, Iraqi police and U.S. military authorities said.
U.S. troops tracked Hamadi al-Takhi al-Nissani, al-Qaeda’s “emir” in Samarra, to a safe house north of the city Friday morning, the U.S. military said in a statement. As the soldiers approached the house, Nissani fled and was killed. Two other armed insurgents in the house were also killed, according to the statement.
On Thursday night, U.S. troops also arrested Abdul Qadir Makhool, another al-Qaeda leader in Samarra, and released a police officer who had been kidnapped by the group, Maj. Jamal Samarraie, an officer at the provincial Joint Command Center, said in an interview…
Nissani “was an individual who they had been working to capture and take down for some time,” Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, said in a telephone interview. “This is a very critical element in halting a lot of the illegal terrorist activity there.”…
It’s interesting the officer would use the word “illegal” as a modifier for “terrorist activity”, implying to westerners there could be legal terror activity, but in the Muslim world the word “illegal” seems to be universally used to denote “wrong” or “immoral” because within Islamic thought these concepts are not separate.