A man believed to have been a top aide of an insurgent with links to al Qaeda has been killed in a U.S. raid in the central Iraqi town of Habbaniya, an Army spokesman said Tuesday.
Abu Mohammed Hamza, an explosives expert, was carrying a Jordanian passport when the military found his body after a raid Thursday, the Army said.

With a knack for improvisation and little help from Baghdad, [Tobin] Bradley, the political adviser for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Nasiriyah, has carried out what may stand as one of the most ambitious democratic experiments in Iraq's history, a project that goes to the heart of the debate about how Iraq's next government should be chosen. In the province of Dhi Qar, about 230 miles southeast of Baghdad and a backwater even by Iraq's standards, residents voting as families will have elected city councils in 16 of the 20 biggest cities by next month. Bradley will have organized 11, more than half of them this month.
At every turn, the elections have set precedents, some of them unanticipated. Voters have typically elected professionals rather than tribal or religious leaders, although the process has energized Islamic parties. Activists have gone door to door to organize women, who turned out in their largest numbers this past week in some of Iraq's most conservative towns. Most important is the way residents qualify to cast ballots - cards issued by Hussein's government to distribute monthly rations.
In the debate over the U.S. -administered transfer of power to an Iraqi government, those cards have emerged as a crux of the dispute. U.S. authorities have resisted elections for choosing the next government, fearing that - in the absence of up-to-date voter rolls - logistical challenges and the potential for fraud could not be addressed before June 30, the date of the scheduled handover. But Iraq's most influential religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has suggested that ration cards could substitute for voter rolls.
While making clear they are not endorsing the idea for all of Iraq, U.S. and British officials say the ration-card system works strikingly well in this province, Iraq's fourth-largest. "In principle, we here are quite in favor of it, and people like it," said John Bourne, the British coordinator in the province. "The question is, will it work on a larger scale here, and the next question is, will it work elsewhere?"
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With about a month of planning - at a cost of about $600 each - Bradley organized back-to-back elections this past week in Chebayish and Fuhud, towns of dirt roads, stagnant puddles and cinder-block huts that border the resurrected marshes Hussein sought to drain in the 1990s. Banners in Fuhud that called voting "a moral, religious and national duty" competed with Hussein-era slogans still painted on walls of the one-story girls' school. "Down with the Jews," one intoned.
Hundreds lined up outside the school, carrying the sometimes smudged, creased or torn ration cards issued to their families, plus one other form of identification. In this election, each family was allowed two votes - one for a man, one for a woman. Ration cards were marked with two stamps, and voters then sat at battered school desks, choosing between five and 10 names from a list of 44 candidates.

• " Going postal " - it's not just for the home front! Looks like some Iraqis are learning the hard way that American postal types can be ornery.

• The Washington Post has an article dealing with frontline views of soldiers returning from Iraq and attempting to debrief their new replacements on the dangers there. Winds of Change.NET has run a few of those, too .

• Intel Dump examines the Improved Explosive Device ("IED") problem facing U.S. troops in Iraq and what measures they are taking to combat the situation. (Hat Tip: Stryker Brigade News )

An anti-American operative in Iraq appealed for help from al-Qaida leaders to help spark a sectarian war between Shiite and Sunni Muslims in an effort to drive the U.S. out of the country, a newspaper reported Monday.
The alleged plan is outlined in a 17-page memo that U.S. forces confiscated from an al-Qaida suspect in Iraq, The New York Times reported. The paper said its reporter viewed the Arabic document and a military translation on Sunday.
The Times says the document is the strongest evidence to date of contacts between extremists in Iraq and al-Qaida.

The document expresses frustration over efforts to force the United States out of Iraq and suggests that attacks on Shiites would prompt Sunni retaliation and a cycle of widening violence, the Times said.
" It is the only way to prolong the duration of the fight between the infidels and us ," the document says. " If we succeed in dragging them into a sectarian war, this will awaken the sleepy Sunnis who are fearful of destruction and death at the hands " of Shiites.
U.S. authorities believe the memo was written by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian who is suspected of having ties to al-Qaida, the Times reported.
The paper said that American forces arrested a man who had the document on a computer disc and was taking it to Afghanistan to get it to al-Qaida's senior leaders. U.S. officials did not identify the man who had the document.
The author of the document claimed he had directed about 25 suicide bombings inside Iraq, but said the resistance against the U.S. occupation was struggling to recruit Iraqis and to combat American troops.
The memo even offers a kind of praise for U.S. forces, saying " America, however, has no intention of leaving no matter how many wounded nor how bloody it becomes. "