Sot Al-Iraq’s correspondent in Yousifiya reported that U.S. troops have detained over 900 people from rural areas around Yousifiya for interrogation since the search operation for three missing U.S. soldiers started this week. The Sadrist Nahrain Net, on the other hand, cited “informed sources” who said the perpetrator of the attack against the American patrol and the abduction of the three soldiers is a former military intelligence officer named Colonel Salih Al-Sa’eedi. Al-Sa’eedi was described as the leader of an Al-Qaeda cell in Yousifiya responsible for killing and abducting Shia residents of the area. Locals also told Nahrain Net that two decapitated heads were discovered in the Arwa’i River near the Qasr Al-Awsat area of Yousifiya. They added that the facial features suggested they might be American soldiers. A U.S. military backpack was also found nearby, the website said.

The website of the Shaheed Al-Mihrab Foundation reported that Sunni insurgents armed with small and medium weapons attacked the Shammar village and the Zikuk area near the town of Nahrawan, east of Baghdad, killing ten residents and abducting three others. Meanwhile, PUK Media cited an unnamed security source that said unknown gunmen dressed in Iraqi Army uniforms in three pickup vehicles attacked a Kurdish village near Mandali, on the Iraqi-Iranian border. The gunmen raided the Hameed Taqi village, which is home to the Fayli Kurd Qara Alus tribe, claiming to search for weapons but then lined up 13 men and shot them, according to the website.

Many of the Fayli Kurdish tribes had returned to their villages in eastern Diyala near the Iranian border following the invasion after they had been displaced by the Ba’athist regime since the early 70s and deported to Iran. Faylis are Kurds of the Shi’ite Muslim faith. Their areas have been largely immune so far from the sectarian violence that ravages central Iraq, but residents said many Kurdish tribesmen in the area are also members of the Kurdish Peshmerga and the Iraqi Army, which may subject them to reprisals by Sunni insurgents who have recently started taking over the religiously mixed town of Mandali.

In Khanaqin, further north of Mandali, clashes broke out between the main two Kurdish parties leaving several people killed and wounded on Friday, according to the Haqq Agency, a development that underscores deep historical grudges between the two parties that share control of the Kurdish autonomous region, north of Iraq. Residents said the clashes erupted after members of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) commemorated the deaths of 7,000 of its partisans on the hands of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) backed by Iraqi Army troops during the intra-Kurdish conflict between 1994 and 1996 over the control of the region. The report could not be confirmed by an independent source.

The Iraq News Agency published a statement by the National Front to Save Diyala responding to accusations made by SIIC and the Badr Organization against the Mujahideen e-Khalq, an Iranian militant opposition group based in Iraq. SIIC had accused the MEK of attacking Shi’ite villages near Muqdadiya, while the Iranian media quoted Hadi Al-Amiri, a senior Badr Organization official, as saying he had information that MEK elements were training terrorists and sending out car bombs to target civilians in the Diyala governorate. The front’s statement pointed out that Camp Ashraf, where most MEK members reside, has been guarded by U.S. troops since 2003, when the MEK was disarmed and their camps consolidated into one. The statement also accused the Iranian regime of using its proxies in Iraq (a reference to SIIC) to push for putting Camp Ashraf under Iraqi control.

Unknown gunmen detonated explosives inside a Sunni shrine at Zubair southwest of Basrah damaging it severely and wounding one person, while gunmen in police uniform abducted eight members of the Sunni community in the area while they were donating blood for the wounded person who died later as a result of his injuries, according to the Al-Iraq News Network. The shrine belongs to Al-Zubair bin Al-Awwam, a companion to the prophet Mohammed, and is located near Zubair, a small Sunni town southwest of Basrah. Several Sunni shrines in the area, such as the Anas bin Malik and Talha bin Ubaid Illah shrines, were damaged as a result of attacks by Shi’ite militias following the bombing of the Askari shrine in Samarra in February 2006.