Alleged death-squad chiefs caught; 4 U.S. troops die; Saddam in court

BAGHDAD, Iraq — A roadside bomb killed a U.S. soldier north of Baghdad on Monday, and the American military announced the capture of two alleged death-squad leaders as U.S. and Iraqi authorities step up efforts to stem rampant sectarian violence.

Three other U.S. troops died Sunday, the military reported Monday.

Meanwhile, a defiant Saddam Hussein refused to enter a plea on genocide charges and dismissed the court as illegitimate as his second trial began Monday in a case prosecutors said will expose the killings of tens of thousands of Kurds nearly two decades ago.

The two men accused of leading death squads were captured Sunday in Baghdad during simultaneous raids.

Both suspects "exercise control over all death-squad cell activity" in the Sunni districts of Dora and Sahha and the predominantly Shiite Abu D'Shair in Baghdad, the military said.

It also accused one of the men of torturing and killing Iraqis in a Shiite mosque, although no details were provided. Four other suspicious individuals were detained during the operation, it said.

The military said a U.S. soldier died Monday when a roadside bomb struck the vehicle in which he was riding.

The death came a day after two Marines and a sailor, assigned to the Regimental Combat Team 7, died in fighting in the province of Anbar, the stronghold of the Sunni Arab insurgency west of Baghdad.

At the start of Saddam's trial Monday, prosecutors displayed photos of women and children found in mass graves left from a 1987-1988 scorched-earth military assault known as Operation Anfal. One showed a dead infant who still had his milk bottle with him.

"It's time for humanity to know ... the magnitude and scale of the crimes committed against the people of Kurdistan," lead prosecutor Munqith al-Faroon said.

The trial is the second for Saddam in alleged atrocities during his regime. It comes with the verdict not expected until Oct. 16 in the first trial — the killings of 148 Shiites in the town of Dujail in the 1980s after an assassination attempt.

Saddam faces hanging if convicted in either case.

Iraqi Kurds were transfixed, seeing the Anfal case as a chance for vengeance against a leader whose regime persecuted their community.

"Today I will have my justice," said Khadhija Salih, a housewife in Sulaimaniyah who lost five brothers and sisters in the Anfal campaign and herself was imprisoned.

"If I could, I would have killed him myself with great pleasure," she said.

Saddam wore the same black suit and white shirt he wore throughout the nine-month Dujail trial and he sat in the same Green Zone courtroom.

But around him, the cast of characters had largely changed, including a new chief judge, Abdullah al-Amiri, 54 — a Shiite who was a judge under Saddam's regime for 25 years.

Saddam also had six new co-defendants, almost all former military figures, in contrast to the seven former intelligence and Baath party officials on trial in the Dujail case.

Chief among them was his cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, 64, who allegedly led the operation and became known as "Chemical Ali" for the use of poison gas.

Saddam, 69, showed the same challenge to the tribunal that he displayed throughout the Dujail proceedings, and his lawyers raised motions that the court was illegitimate.

Asked to give his name for the record, Saddam replied, "You know me." Then he denounced the court as following "the law of the occupation."

Finally, he identified himself as "the president of the republic and commander in chief of the armed forces," maintaining his insistence he is still Iraq's leader.