BAGHDAD: A Sunni Arab insurgent group released a video on Monday that showed the military identification cards of two missing American soldiers abducted in an ambush south of Baghdad last month.
The video - from the Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella insurgent group that includes Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia - did not indicate whether the two soldiers were alive or dead.
But an American military official with the missing soldiers' unit said the identification cards appeared to be authentic, suggesting that other clues about the ambush might be found in the footage.
"We've been on the lookout for something like this," said Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Garver, an American military spokesman in Baghdad. Investigators, he said, "will continue to review it for whatever information we can gain from it." The body of a third soldier missing in the May 12 attack was found 11 days later. Four other Americans and an Iraqi soldier were killed in the ambush.
Videos of kidnapped Westerners and attacks against American troops have frequently been used for propaganda purposes by insurgents. The video on Monday was less graphic than usual and provided little proof that those who produced the video actually held the two soldiers captive.
The appearance of the video nearly a month after the ambush attack suggested what some American military commanders have suspected all along - that the insurgents are seeking to drag out the process of discovery, to deny closure to the families of the missing soldiers and the thousands of American and Iraqi troops who have been searching for them since the day they disappeared.
The video was undated. Of the nearly 11 minutes of footage, the only portion that purportedly corresponds to the attack shows what appears to be a burning Humvee, videotaped from far away at night for a few seconds. The attack occurred before dawn on May 12 near Yusufiya, a Sunni Arab stronghold about 25 kilometers, or 15 miles, south of the capital, and the two Humvees attacked did in fact burn. But the video shows neither the three soldiers abducted nor the five soldiers killed during the ambush.
What the video does show is a group of masked men apparently planning the ambush using a diagram pinned to a tree. Personal items that appear to belong to the soldiers are also shown, including a pistol, credit cards, and American and Iraqi currency.
At the very end, the video shows a still image of both sides of the photo identifications of Specialist Alex Jimenez, 25, of Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Private Byron Fouty, 19, of Waterford, Michigan.
Above the photos, written in Arabic, was the message, "Bush is the reason for the loss of your sons." The video does not refer to Private First Class Joseph Anzack Jr., 20, of Torrance, California, who was also abducted in the ambush. On May 23, Anzack's body was pulled from the Euphrates River in Babil Province, south of Baghdad.
The video repeatedly mocks the American military for being unable to find the soldiers. Citing the American use of helicopters and unmanned aircraft, the video's narrator said, "They felt arrogant because of their abilities and the technology, which was humiliated by the hands of the Islamic State's soldiers." The narrator said the gunmen did not kill the soldiers immediately "for a reason," but the reason is never given.
He also criticizes the American search, accusing American soldiers of insulting women and the elderly.
Despite all their efforts, the narrator said, "they failed."
Details also emerged Monday about who might have been responsible for a high-profile kidnapping of five Britons last week from an Iraqi government building.
The American commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, said Monday that gunmen responsible for the abductions were most likely part of the same Shiite militant cell whose leader was killed last month by an American special operations unit after he was implicated in the deaths of five American troops in Karbala in January.
The suspected Shiite cell leader, Sheik Azhar al-Duleimi, was killed after American troops raided a Baghdad home on May 17, officers said. They described Duleimi as organizing the attack in Karbala, in which 9 to 12 men wearing American uniforms drove sport-utility vehicles into a government compound, where they killed one soldier and abducted four others who were killed a short time later.
In a brief interview, Petraeus suggested that retaliation for the killing of Duleimi might have been the motivation for the abduction of the Britons, who were seized from a Ministry of Finance compound in Baghdad on May 29 by gunmen dressed as police commandos.
"There is a pretty good chance they are from the cell whose leader Azhar al-Duleimi we killed a few weeks back," Petraeus said. "He was the individual who led the raid who killed our soldiers in Karbala."
The general said he believed the cell was one of the many groups that have splintered off from the Mahdi army, the militia of the anti-American Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr. He said that he was unaware of any contacts with the kidnappers, and that American-led forces were doing all they could to locate the Britons. "There has been a very intense search ongoing for them," he said.
David S. Cloud, Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Ahmad Fadam contributed reporting for this article.
David S. Cloud and Damien Cave reported from Baghdad:
Three months after the start of the Baghdad security plan that has added thousands of U.S. and Iraqi troops to the capital, they control fewer than one-third of the city's neighborhoods, far short of the initial goal for the operation, according to some commanders and an internal military assessment.
The assessment, completed in late May, found that American and Iraqi forces were able to "to protect the population" and "maintain physical influence over" only 146 of the 457 Baghdad neighborhoods.
In the remaining 311 districts, troops either have not begun operations aimed at rooting out insurgents or still face "resistance," according to the one-page assessment, which summarized reports from brigade and battalion commanders in Baghdad.
The document offers the first comprehensive look at how the effort to stabilize Baghdad with the heavy influx of additional troops is progressing. The last remaining U.S. contributions to the troop increase are just now arriving.
Violence has diminished in many areas but is chronic in mixed Shiite-Sunni neighborhoods in western Baghdad, several senior officers said. Over all, improvements have not been as widespread or lasting across Baghdad, they acknowledged.
When planners designed the Baghdad security strategy late last year, they had assumed that most Baghdad neighborhoods would be under control around July, according to a senior U.S. military officer, so that the emphasis could shift to restoring services and rebuilding the neighborhoods.
"We were way too optimistic," said the officer, adding that September is now the goal for establishing basic security in most neighborhoods.
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