American escapes captors

BAGHDAD -- Thomas Hamill, an American contractor held hostage since April 9, was recovered yesterday by US troops after apparently escaping from his captors, US military officials said.

Hamill, a truck driver with the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, apparently escaped from a building where he had been held. He approached US soldiers operating close to a pipeline near the northern city of Tikrit, 90 miles north of Baghdad, about 10:20 a.m. and identified himself.

Meanwhile, 11 US service members in Iraq were killed in four separate attacks by insurgents late Saturday evening and yesterday, including six who died in a mortar attack in Ramadi, the military reported.

And the former Iraqi general chosen to head a new force in Fallujah denied there were any foreign fighters in the city, calling into question his commitment to American military objectives. Later, a top US commander said the general would not be allowed to lead the armed men he has already assembled.

Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the chief US military spokesman in Baghdad, said Hamill was meeting with US officials seeking details about his captivity and the people who held him. ''He has spoken to his family, and now he is ready to get back to work" Kimmitt told reporters in Baghdad.

Major Neal E. O'Brien, a spokesman for the First Infantry Division, said a company operating near the town of Balad, south of Tikrit, were approached by a wounded man later identified as Hamill. O'Brien said Hamill then took the soldiers to the house where he was held captive, and troops cordoned off the area. Two Iraqi men were arrested in the search, O'Brien said, and one AK-47 assault rifle was seized.

Hamill was taken by helicopter to a field hospital, and then to Baghdad, where Hamill is in stable condition, O'Brien said.

Hamill, 43, was kidnapped April 9, when his convoy came under fire near the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad. He was taken with six other Kellogg Brown & Root employees also traveling the road that leads to Fallujah, where US forces have been engaged in a bitter battle with Iraqi insurgents. Four of the men have since been found dead.

In Fallujah, Jassim Mohammed Saleh, the former Iraqi major general entrusted by the Marines with forming a new security force in the violence-racked city, said in an interview with Reuters news service that ''there are no foreign fighters in Fallujah." He also insisted that onetime members of former president Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party should be allowed to return to the government or the army, saying they were ''capable of administering the country in times of crisis."

Saleh's comments contradict US intelligence reports -- and his orders from Marine commanders. A senior US military official said there were about 200 foreign fighters inside the city as of Friday. The top Marine commander in Iraq, Lieutenant General James T. Conway, said at a news conference on Saturday that Saleh and his deputies ''understand our view that these people must be killed or captured." At the time, Conway said Saleh and his lieutenants ''have not flinched."

Although a Marine spokesman said Saleh's force had expanded to 600 soldiers yesterday, double the size it was a day earlier, it remained unclear exactly where those troops were.

As questions mounted about Saleh's performance and his background, General Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the former general would not be given command of the new force, named the Fallujah Brigade. ''He will not be their leader," Myers said on ABC's ''This Week" program.

Saleh, who is originally from Fallujah but had been living in Baghdad, served as the commanding general of the Iraqi Army's 38th Infantry Division before the US administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, dissolved the entire Iraqi Army almost a year ago. Earlier in his military career, Saleh served in the Republican Guard, an elite branch of the army used at times by Hussein to suppress internal dissent.

A senior US military official in Baghdad said intelligence officers still had not finished a background check on Saleh, but there were reports that ''he doesn't play well with others." The senior official suggested that Saleh would eventually become a commander of one of the battalions within the Fallujah Brigade and that former Major General Latif Mahal Hamoud Sabawi would become commander of the brigade. Conway said Sabawi is ''very well respected by the Iraqi general officers."

Myers, who appeared on three Sunday morning news shows, cautioned that the Pentagon had not approved either of the generals. ''They have not been vetted. They have not been placed in command," Myers said on ''FOX News Sunday."

Myers said the leadership of the Fallujah Brigade also would have to be approved by the US occupation authority in Baghdad and Iraq's interim defense ministry. The decision to form the Fallujah Brigade and put Saleh in charge was made from ''the bottom up," the senior official said. ''Now we have to have a policy to catch up with what is happening on the ground."

A Marine spokesman did not have any immediate reaction to Myers's comments, and it was not clear whether Saleh would comply with a US order to relinquish command of the new force.

One US military official said that step could prove tricky. ''We've just told him he can form a brigade and take over the city," the official said. ''Now we're telling him that he has to step aside? Do we just expect him to go home?"

Myers also denied that Marines had withdrawn from Fallujah. ''The reports that the Marines have pulled back -- not true," he said on the FOX program. ''The Marines are still where they've been."

In fact, two Marine battalions -- the First Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, and the Second Battalion, Second Marine Regiment -- have pulled out of positions in or near the city. The First Battalion vacated its forward operating base in a beverage factory inside the city and moved to a base 5 miles outside the city Friday.

Word of Hamill's recovery, described by Kimmitt as a ''providential pickup," came on an otherwise grim day for US forces in Iraq.

The mortar strike in western Iraq that killed six US service members also wounded 30, a military spokesman said.

In addition, two soldiers and two members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps were killed in a roadside bomb attack early yesterday, said Air Force Lieutenant Serena K. Wallace, a spokeswoman for the US military command in the capital.

Attackers described as members of a militia controlled by Moqtada al-Sadr, a rebellious Shi'ite cleric, attacked a US military convoy with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades on Saturday evening near Amarah, 180 miles south of Baghdad, a US military official said. Two soldiers died in that attack.

Near Kirkuk, a US soldier was killed and 10 were wounded when insurgents detonated a roadside bomb and fired assault rifles at a US base, a military spokesman said.