Military releases 5 Iraqi women detainees

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The U.S. military released five Iraqi women detainees Thursday, a move demanded by the kidnappers of an American reporter to spare her life, but an official said the release was coincidental.\nThe women were freed from U.S. custody and delivered to the home of a senior Sunni Arab politician in Baghdad, where they were returned to their families, according to an Associated Press photographer at the scene. They were later driven away in taxis.\nArmed men who abducted Jill Carroll on Jan. 7 in Baghdad have threatened to kill the freelance reporter for the Christian Science Monitor unless all Iraqi women prisoners were freed.\n"We've seen the reports," said David Cook, the Washington bureau chief for The Christian Science Monitor. "We're waiting to see if there are hopeful developments in Iraq."\nAn Iraq Interior Ministry official said the releases could help free Carroll.\n"Any announcement may not benefit the case because of its sensitivity, but we can say, God willing, that she will be released," Maj. Gen. Hussein Ali Kamal, the ministry's head of intelligence, told The Associated Press. "The release of the five Iraqi women might assist in releasing Carroll."\nThe U.S. military announced earlier that the women would be freed as part of a group of about 420 Iraqis to be released Thursday and Friday from military custody after reviews of their cases determined there was no reason to detain them further.\nThe military had confirmed it was holding nine Iraqi women. The fate of the remaining four was not immediately clear. Another two women were detained Wednesday in the northern city of Mosul for alleged insurgent activities, the military said Thursday.\nDetainees are regularly freed in Iraq following reviews of their cases, a process that can take months, and U.S. officials have said the pending releases were part of the routine procedure and not linked to Carroll's case.\nA tearful Siham Faraj confirmed that her 28-year-old daughter, Hala Khalid, returned home Thursday after being arrested with her brother on Sept. 24 during a dawn raid by U.S. forces on their Baghdad home.\n"My daughter is home now and in good health after spending four months in detention. I'm so happy," Faraj told the AP in a telephone interview, the sounds of laughter and celebrations being heard in the background.\nFaraj also called on the kidnappers of Carroll to release her, saying she is just as innocent as her own daughter.\nElsewhere in Iraq, two U.S. soldiers were killed in separate attacks Wednesday. One was killed and another wounded by a roadside bomb blast south of Baghdad, while a soldier assigned to U.S. Marines operating in western Iraq died from wounds sustained by a rocket attack on his vehicle near Ramadi.\nAt least 2,238 members of the U.S. military have died since the war began, according to an AP count.\nIn Washington, President Bush shrugged off a recent Pentagon-contracted report which concluded the Army was overextended and cannot sustain the pace of troop deployments to Iraq long enough to break the back of the insurgency there.\nThe president predicted victory in Iraq and said, "Our commanders will have the troops necessary to do that."\nIn Kirkuk, 180 miles north of Baghdad, gunmen driving a red Opel assassinated a senior official of Iraq's anti-corruption commission and the deputy director of a state-run food stuff company in separate attacks Thursday, police Capt. Farhad Talabani said.\nAnti-corruption official Othman Majeed Rasheed, a 51-year-old Turkoman, was walking from his home to his nearby office when he was killed by a hail of gunfire, Talabani said.\nShortly after, the same group of gunmen shot dead Jomaa Rasheed, a Kurd who is the deputy director of the state-run company for food stuffs, in the same area, Talabani said. The two victims were unrelated.