Ground forces, helicopters and airplanes fanned out shortly after Friday's attack and U.S. military spokesman U.S. Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said Saturday that four raids had been carried out.

He said a dive team also was to search for the men, whose checkpoint was near a Euphrates River canal not far from Youssifiyah, 12 miles south of Baghdad - in the so-called triangle of death, named for the frequent ambushes against U.S. soldiers and Iraqi troops in the area.

Ahmed Khalaf Falah, a farmer who said he witnessed the attack Friday, said three Humvees were manning a checkpoint when they came under fire from many directions. Two of the vehicles went after the assailants, but the third was ambushed before it could move, he told The Associated Press.

Seven masked gunmen, including one with what he described as a heavy machine gun, killed the driver of the third vehicle, then took the two other U.S. soldiers captive, the witness said. The account could not be verified.

The U.S. military said Sunday it was continuing the search but had no new information to provide.

"Coalition and Iraqi forces will continue to search everywhere possible, uncovering every stone, until our soldiers are found, and we will continue to use every resource available in our search," it said.

The New York Times also reported in its Sunday editions that Iraqi residents in the area said they saw two U.S. soldiers taken prisoner by a group of masked guerrillas. It said the two surviving soldiers were led to two cars and driven away.

Falah also said tensions were high in the area as U.S. soldiers raided some houses and arrested men. He also said the Americans were setting up checkpoints on all roads leading to the area of the attack and helicopters were hovering at low altitudes.

He did not give more details and no new raids were announced by the military early Sunday.

The military said Saturday that soldiers at a nearby checkpoint heard small-arms fire and explosions during the attack that occurred at 7:15 p.m. on Friday, and a quick-reaction force reached the scene within 15 minutes. The force found one soldier dead but no sign of the two others.

"We are currently using every means at our disposal on the ground, in the air and in the water to find them," said Caldwell, the spokesman for U.S. forces in Baghdad.

He said blocking positions were established throughout the area within an hour of the attack to keep suspects from fleeing.

He also noted the military was still searching for Sgt. Keith Matthew Maupin, who went missing on April 9, 2004.

"We continue to search using every means available and will not stop looking until we find the missing soldiers," he said.

Maupin was captured when insurgents ambushed his fuel convoy with the 724th Transportation Co. west of Baghdad. A week later, Arab television network Al-Jazeera aired a videotape showing Maupin sitting on the floor surrounded by five masked men holding automatic rifles.

That June, Al-Jazeera aired another tape purporting to show a U.S. soldier being shot. But the dark, grainy tape showed only the back of the victim's head and did not show the actual shooting. The Army ruled it was inconclusive whether the soldier was Maupin.

A 20-year-old private first class at the time of his capture, Maupin has been promoted twice since then.

U.S. troops, meanwhile, combed through the "Triangle of Death," a predominantly Sunni Arab region south of the capital looking for two soldiers missing since an attack Friday on a traffic checkpoint that also killed one of their comrades.

The spree of bombings and mortar attacks in Baghdad was an embarrassment for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who ordered more police and army checkpoints for the city last week to restore security for its 5 million residents.

His Sunni Arab deputy prime minister, Salam Zikam Ali al-Zubaie, charged that the plan was not properly thought out and needed more work.

"I can say that I am not pleased with the way the Baghdad security plan began," he told al-Jazeera television. "The Baghdad plan has begun, but it will need a year or more to finish."

Al-Zubaie said the Interior Ministry, which is responsible for Iraq's police forces, first has to be cleansed of people who may be responsible for "human rights violations." Many Sunnis charge that Shiite-dominated security services have been infiltrated by Shiite militias blamed for sectarian violence.

"There are a lot of officials who were responsible for committing numerous acts of foolishness and many human right violations who are still in positions of responsibility," al-Zubaie said.

Eight attacks killed at least 27 people and wounded dozens in the Baghdad area.

The violence included a suicide bomber who blew up his car as it was being towed near a police checkpoint in Mahmoudiya, south of the city, killing four civilians and injuring 15. The bomber had claimed his car broke down and hired a tractor to tow it while he rode inside, police Capt. Rashid al-Samarie said.

A mortar barrage also hit a residential area in Mahmoudiya, a predominantly Sunni town about 20 miles south of Baghdad, killing one civilian and wounding three.

In Baghdad itself, a mortar shell hit one of Baghdad's best known markets, in the predominantly Shiite suburb of Kazimiyah, killing at least four people and wounding 13, police said.

About a half hour later, two people died and 24 were wounded when a bomb left in a plastic bag exploded at an outdoor market where secondhand goods are sold in central Baghdad.

Police said a suicide bomber targeting an Iraqi army patrol near Wathiq Square in the same neighborhood killed seven people when he blew himself up.

A parked car bomb in southwest Baghdad killed six people and wounded 36, police said.

Three mortar rounds hit a popular open-air market in the al-Bour area of northern Baghdad, killing two and wounding 14.

One other person died from a roadside bombing.

The blasts stepped up a surge of violence that has shattered the fragile calm imposed by the security crackdown launched a week after bombs dropped by a U.S. warplane killed al-Zarqawi in a hideout June 7.

On Friday, a suspected shoe bomber targeting a Shiite imam who criticized al-Zarqawi blew himself up inside the Buratha mosque during the main weekly religious service, killing 13 people and wounding 28. The assault was staged during a four-hour driving ban meant to prevent suicide car bombs during Friday prayers.

It was the second attack on the Buratha mosque in just over two months. On April 7, four suicide bombers, including a woman, set off their explosives during Friday prayers, killing at least 85 worshippers. The U.S. military blamed al-Zarqawi's followers.

On Friday, Al-Jazeera aired an audio tape of a key insurgency leader calling al-Zarqawi's death a "great loss" but saying it would strengthen the militants' determination.

The broadcaster identified the voice as that of Abu Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi, head of the Mujahedeen Shura Council, which groups five Iraqi insurgent organizations including al-Qaida in Iraq. The authenticity of the tape could not immediately be verified.

Discussing the missing American soldiers, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said that four raids had been carried out since Friday's attack and that ground forces, helicopters and airplanes were taking part in the search.

The soldiers came under attack at a traffic checkpoint next to a canal southwest of Youssifiyah, 12 miles south of Baghdad. The area is considered and insurgent hotbed.

"We are currently using every means at our disposal on the ground, in the air and in the water to find them," Caldwell said.

It was one of a series of attacks that killed more than two dozen people Saturday despite heightened security, dealing a blow to the Iraqi government's pledge to bring peace to the capital.

On Sunday, police found the bullet-riddled bodies of 10 men who apparently had been tortured in several areas of Baghdad, said Lt. Thaer Mahmoud.

The body of a man in his 20s was found in Karbala, 50 miles south of Baghdad, health authorities said. He had been shot in the head, and his body showed signs of torture.

A mortar shell hit the al-Sadiq University for Islamic Studies on Palestine Street, one of the capital's main thoroughfares, wounding five students and a teacher, police Lt. Ahmed Qasim said.

One report detailed several incidents involving U.S. special operations forces in 2003-04. It said interrogators fed some Iraqi detainees only bread and water for up to 17 days, used unapproved interrogation practices such as sleep deprivation and loud music and stripped at least one prisoner.

That report concluded the detainees' treatment was wrong but not illegal and reflected inadequate resources and lack of oversight and proper guidance rather than deliberate abuse. No military personnel were punished as a result of the investigation.

The findings were included in more than 1,000 pages of documents the Pentagon released to the American Civil Liberties Union on Friday under a Freedom of Information request. They included two major reports - one by Army Brig. Gen. Richard Formica on specials operations forces in Iraq and one by Brig. Gen. Charles Jacoby on Afghanistan detainees.

While some of the incidents have been reported previously and reviewed by members of Congress, this was the first time the documents were made public. Many portions of the reports were blacked out, including specific names and locations.

"Both the Formica and the Jacoby report demonstrate that the government is really not taking the investigation of detainee abuse seriously," said Amrit Singh, an ACLU attorney.

Singh called the reports "a whitewash." In particular, she said, there have been numerous documents showing that special operations forces abused detainees, but Formica only reviewed a few cases.

Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros said: "We've undertaken significant steps to investigate, hold people accountable and change our operations as appropriate. This is all part of our effort to be transparent and show that we investigate all allegations thoroughly, and we take them seriously."

Less than a week ago, three detainees committed suicide at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba, highlighting accusations of abuse. A little more than two years ago, the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq came to light, with its graphic photographs of detainees being sexually humiliated and threatened with dogs.

The Bush administration has been criticized internationally, including by U.S. allies, for abusive treatment of terror war detainees. Late last year, Congress forced Bush to accept a ban on the cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of prisoners by U.S. troops.

Administration officials have said the U.S. uses legal interrogation techniques - not torture - to gain information that could head off terror attacks.

The Formica review recommended better training, new standards for detention centers and updated policies for detainee operations, among other things. The final report is dated November 2004.

Formica reviewed three allegations of abuse by special operations forces who held detainees in temporary facilities, often hastily set up near where they were captured. He found that overall conditions "did not comport with the spirit of the principles set forth in the Geneva Conventions," which require humane treatment of prisoners.

For example, Formica said, the forces used five interrogation techniques that were allowed at one point but had been rescinded by then: sleep or food deprivation, yelling and loud music, forcing detainees to remain in stressful physical positions and changing environmental conditions.

Formica also said stripping prisoners "was unnecessary and inconsistent with the principles of dignity and respect" in the Geneva Conventions. And while one of the prisoners fed just bread and water appeared to be in good condition, he said, 17 days of that diet "is too long."

He said more serious allegations of rape, sodomy and beatings were not substantiated by medical examinations and the accusers' stories changed over time and were not credible.

Jacoby was dispatched in May 2004 to examine the treatment of detainees at facilities in Afghanistan.

His report found "no systematic or widespread mistreatment of detainees," but concluded that the opportunities for mistreatment and the ever-changing battlefield there demanded changes in procedures.

He said there was "a consistent lack of knowledge" regarding the capture, processing, detention and interrogation of detainees, with different policies at facilities across the country. Jacoby also concluded that "inconsistent and unevenly applied" interrogation standards created opportunities for abuse and impeded efforts to gain timely intelligence.

To date, there have been about 600 investigations into detainee-related incidents, including natural deaths and detainee assaults on other detainees, according to Army spokesman Paul Boyce. As a result, he said, 267 soldiers have received some type of punishment, including 85 courts-martial and 95 nonjudicial actions.

Maverick Haider is a personal friend of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and visited Iraq's former president Saddam Hussein shortly before the US-led invasion started in 2003.

Austria's attitude towards the US has worsened over the past three years, Die Presse reported separately, citing a Eurobarometer poll.

The poll showed 62 per cent thought the US played a negative role for world peace, up from 56 per cent in the same poll in 2003, Die Presse said, and 49 per cent found the US role in fighting terrorism negative.

"It shows that special operations task forces were repeatedly involved in detainee abuse incidents and they continued to escape scrutiny."

A Pentagon spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Mark Ballesteros, said: "The US policy is to treat all detainees humanely".

The report, he added, "covers prior events - they are not new abuses - and we have undertaken significant steps to investigate, hold accountable and change our operations as appropriate".

The report described special operations troops, at a temporary holding facility in April 2004, keeping detainees in a room on a chain, with a diet chiefly of bread and water, for up to 17 days.

But it concluded this diet was not intended as punishment and that, for short periods, eating just bread and water "is sufficient to maintain good health and prevent the onset of nutritional deficiencies".

"In my judgment, if true as alleged in the case of the one detainee, 17 days with only bread and water is too long," the report stated, but said he "appeared in good health".

The report cited a case in which detainees were kept at a special operations team's temporary holding facility in small cells - measuring 51cm by 1.2m by 1.22m - for up to seven days, with at least one detainee kept naked.

It found that the cells fell short of minimum standards for detainee quarters, called the removal of clothing unacceptable and said a week in such a cell was too long.

The report did not recommend discipline of US personnel and concluded the incidents were not the result of deliberate or malicious attempts by US forces to abuse detainees.

Ms Singh said the reach of the report appeared narrow, "almost in a deliberate attempt to avoid the truth of the extent of detainee abuse".

The high degree of surveillance has foiled dozens of previous attempts by prisoners to take their own lives. 'It happened in front of me several times. The soldiers would see what was happening and they were in the cell in seconds,' Rasul said. But somehow, in circumstances that the Pentagon has succeeded in keeping totally obscure, late on Friday, 9 June, three detainees, all weak and emaciated after months on hunger strike and being force-fed, managed to tease bedsheets through their cells' mesh walls, tie them into nooses and hang themselves. With the cells little taller than the height of a man, they stood no chance of breaking their necks: the only way they could die was slowly, by hypoxia.

'That would take at least four or five minutes, probably longer,' said Dr David Nicholl, consultant neurologist at Birmingham's Queen Elizabeth Hospital, who has been co-ordinating international opposition to Guantanamo by physicians. 'It's very difficult to see how, if the landing was being properly patrolled, they could have managed to accomplish it.'

Accomplish it, however, they did. And virtually simultaneously. A little before midnight the bodies of Manei Shaman Turki al-Habadi, 30, and Yasser Talal al-Zahrani, 21, both from Saudi Arabia, and of a Yemeni, Ali Abdullah Ahmed, 29, were found on Alpha Block. How long they had been like that, the Pentagon will not disclose. Their mouths were stuffed with cloth, apparently to muffle any cries.

As often before in its four-and-a-half-year propaganda war over Guantanamo, the US military and its masters in Washington decided that the best means of defence to what looked - at best - like a case of criminal negligence was to go on the offensive. The dead men, said Guantanamo's commander, Navy Rear Admiral Harry Harris, when the news broke last Saturday, had 'no regard for human life, neither ours nor their own. They are smart, they are creative, they are committed. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetric warfare against us.'

Colleen Graffy, a senior State Department official who recently visited London to make the case for Guantanamo with the UK media, called the suicides a 'good PR move' and 'a tactic to further the jihadi cause'. The US government tried to distance itself from Graffy's remarks. But early on Sunday The Observer talked to the camp's top Washington spin doctor, Lieutenant Commander Jeffrey Gordon, an official in Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's office and the Pentagon's chief press officer. According to Gordon, whatever the outcome of the investigation now being conducted by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, there was no need to regret the deaths. All three men, Gordon said, had been dedicated terrorists: 'These guys were fanatics like the Nazis, Hitlerites, or the Ku Klux Klan, the people they tried at Nuremberg.'

He went on to make specific allegations against each: Ahmed had been a 'mid-to-high-level al-Qaeda operative' with key links to Abu Zubaydah, an al-Qaeda leader captured in 2002; Habadi had been a 'militant recruiter' who worked with a second tier group called Jama'at Tabligh, and knew of operations in Qatar and Pakistan. As for Zahrani, he was a 'frontline Taliban fighter' who had played a prominent part in the November 2001 prison uprising in Mazar-e-Sharif, in which a CIA man died.

All this may be true. On the other hand, they had not been charged with anything. Questionable as it often is and consisting of statements made after torture or coercion, the Pentagon has disseminated some evidence against more than 300 Guantanamo detainees, in federal court filings and at internal camp boards that reviewed their detention. Against the three suicides, it has presented nothing.

Meanwhile, the information available suggests that the explanation of the deaths rejected by Harris - that the men tried to kill themselves through despair and succeeded through the incompetence of his staff - remains more plausible.

Rasul said: 'I was shocked by what happened, though not surprised, because I saw it almost happen so often. It was always scary: I would see people deteriorating mentally in front of my eyes until they tried to take their own lives, and you always thought: "That could be me". There were even times when I thought about it myself, but I wanted to be strong for my family. When I did, believe me, it wasn't because I was trying to hurt the United States, but on days when I'd just been told I'd never see England again, and that I was a terrorist, and when I denied it they wouldn't listen.'

The suicides triggered new calls to close Guantanamo, from the Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, the European Union and others. But the Pentagon will go to considerable lengths to block any independent scrutiny of what happened.

News of the suicides broke while I was flying to Washington from London, in order to travel to Guantanamo on a military flight next day and cover a military commission tribunal. A message on my mobile phone - from a fellow reporter, not the Pentagon - said that both had been cancelled. Thus I made the first of many calls to Jeffrey Gordon. At first, he could not have been more helpful. To enter Guantanamo, he said, one needed an 'area clearance', and because mine had been issued for the tribunal it was no longer valid. However, the press office at Guantanamo or Southern Command in Miami might be able to issue a new one, Gordon said. Clearance was not, he pointed out, the only problem. Now that the military plane had been cancelled, the only way to reach Guantanamo was on scheduled 18-seat flights from Florida and Kingston, Jamaica. They tended to be fully booked well in advance.

I teamed up with another British journalist, David Jones of the Daily Mail, to organise clearance and investigate flights. By the end of Sunday, we thought we were on our way. Jones found a private charter firm willing to fly us to the camp from Kingston. Guantanamo's head of public affairs, Commander Robert Durand, explained in an email he was seeking authorisation from Harris. 'He's a pretty open sort of guy,' Durand said, 'and I can't see any reason for not granting you clearance since you were coming already.' At 7.30pm one of Durand's staff phoned to say there were new clearances. He faxed them a few minutes later.

Next day Jones and I got up at 4am to fly to Miami, where we checked with Guantanamo one last time that everything was in order and got on a plane to Kingston. There, at check-in for our private flight, the manager was apologetic. 'Guys, I'm so sorry. Jeffrey Gordon called me from the Pentagon five minutes ago. Your clearances have been revoked.' Over the next 48 hours, I had several heated conversations and email exchanges with Gordon. At first he was apologetic: the new clearances had been 'a mistake' and he would try to get us a refund on the plane costs. Later he became more aggressive: forgetting that he had advised me to approach Durand at Guantanamo, he claimed that we tried to 'get round' the Pentagon by obtaining clearance from a clerk. His last email stated that our conduct had been 'ethically questionable, at best'. It was left to Durand to shed a little light. For the time being, he said, his ability to issue clearances had been removed and assumed by Rumsfeld's office alone.

Meanwhile, three US reporters at the base were ordered to leave. According to a Pentagon spokesman quoted by the US media, the reason was that two barred British reporters - us - had threatened to sue if the Americans were allowed to stay. This was, of course, untrue.

Closing Guantanamo to the media meant there were no reporters there as the Naval Criminal Investigative Service team went about its work; none when pathologists conducted post mortem examinations; and none last Friday when, after a Muslim ceremony conducted by a military chaplain, the first body - Ahmed's - was prepared to be flown home. It was also impossible to gauge the impact of the deaths on the 460 inmates.

Yet our bizarre experience raises a fundamental question: when it comes to Guantanamo, can the world believe a single word that Gordon and his numerous cohorts say? There is, to say the least, an alternative explanation for the three Guantanamo deaths. Since early 2003, when the Red Cross issued the first of many reports stating that inmates were experiencing high levels of depression, there has been mounting evidence that detention there has wrought havoc on some prisoners' mental health. It is not so surprising: most prisoners get just two 30-minute periods out of their cells - the size of a double bed - each week, except when being interrogated. Some have endured this since 2002, and have no idea when, if ever, they may leave.

By the time of my own visit in October 2003, a fifth of them were on Prozac and there had been so many suicide attempts - 40 by August 2003 - that the Pentagon had reclassified hangings as 'manipulative self-injurious behaviours'. Cannily, perhaps, it has refused to give exact statistics on how many SIBs have occurred, claiming that since the reclassification there have been (until last week) only two genuine attempted suicides.

Tarek Dergoul, another freed British former detainee, knew two of the dead men well. 'I was next to or opposite Manei [Habadi] for weeks, maybe months,' he said, 'and like me his morale was high. He was always up for a protest: a hunger strike or a non-co-operation strike. He used to recite poetry, not just Arabic, but English - he knew chunks of Macbeth and he taught me how to read the Koran correctly. When you go through that sort of experience with someone, you really get to know them. I just can't believe he would take his own life. He would have had to be really desperate.' Likewise, Dergoul said, Zahrani was 'a person everyone loved. It's offensive to me to say he could have killed himself.' Apart from anything else, all three men would have been deeply aware of Islam's prohibition of suicide.

However, the men may well have been so desperate that they ignored the prohibition - even if, as seems likely, they co-ordinated their deaths in the hope of increasing their political impact. Many lawyers who have visited clients at Guantanamo have spoken eloquently of their despair: this year a prisoner tried to kill himself in front of his US attorney, somehow managing to open his veins, covering himself in blood, as the lawyer watched in horror, unable - because of the screen that separated them - to intervene.

Dergoul also suggested how the three may have been able to kill themselves undetected. Sometimes, he said, instead of patrolling the guards 'used to sit in their room at the end. It's a long walk from end to end of the block and some nights they didn't feel like it: they'd sit in their room, smoking and playing cards. You'd need toilet paper or something and you'd yell "MP, MP!" But they wouldn't come - it could be as long as an hour.'

One might, just about, imagine such a scene in a British prison. One can also envisage what might happen if three men committed suicide on the same landing at the same time: public inquiries, sackings, outrage. All three had been on hunger strike, with few breaks, since the middle of last summer. This meant that, four times a day, they were strapped down in restraining chairs so that they could not move their limbs and force-fed through nasal tubes, inserted and removed each time - a process the Pentagon's own court documents state causes bleeding and nausea. It is not hard to see why that may have made them depressed.

According to newly declassified testimony by another prisoner shortly before the suicides, a guard recently told him: 'They have lost hope in life. They have no hope in their eyes. They are ghosts and they want to die. No food will keep them alive right now.' This prisoner, the former British resident Shaker Aamer, told his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, that the three dead men and other hunger strikers were so ill whenever their feeds contained protein that it went 'right through them' causing severe diarrhoea.

Last week Rumsfeld got what he wanted: the removal of media scrutiny from Guantanamo's deepest crisis. Potentially embarrassing, perhaps very damaging, headlines have been averted, and tomorrow, with the most sensitive tasks in the wake of the deaths complete, Guantanamo's public affairs office will resume its chaperoned tours. But the bigger costs of shutting out the daylight are making themselves felt.

On BBC1's Question Time last week, Falconer called the camp 'intolerable and wrong', adding that it acted as a recruiting agent for those who would attack all our values. Proving his point next day, some former Guantanamo detainees suggested the three dead men had been murdered, a claim echoed by their families and the government of Yemen next day.

The Pentagon response to the suicides was characterised by panic, smears and blatant obstruction. One might be forgiven for thinking that its vehement denials lacked a little weight.

Coalition forces spokesman Major General William Caldwell said the new leader, Abu Ayyub al-Masri (meaning 'the Egyptian' in Arabic), also known as Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Muhajer (meaning 'the immigrant'), was believed to be operating out of Baghdad.

Al-Qaeda, which has not disclosed the new leader's nationality, "on its website has named him as Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, but we believe that he is one and the same", Caldwell told reporters.

According to Zayat, who says he does not know Masri personally, Zarqawi's successor lived in the central Cairo area of Zawyia Hamra before going to Afghanistan in the late 1980s or early 90s, and then on to Iraq via Iran.

Zayat is the main lawyer for the Gamaa Islamiya and Islamic Jihad, two Islamic militant groups which were behind a wave of violent attacks that killed 1,300 people in Egypt during the 1990s.

A government crackdown left the two groups' members killed, behind bars or fleeing the country, while others renounced the use of violence in their campaign for an Islamic state.

About one third of Al-Qaeda's members are believed to be Egyptians, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, the organization's number two and Osama bin Laden's right-hand man.

"The Americans have given details of his past, saying he (al-Masri) joined Islamic Jihad in 1982 and make him out to be one of the founders of Al-Qaeda in Iraq without knowing his real name, which is difficult to believe," says Rashwan.

The photo shown by the US military does not show "the facial features of an Egyptian man but rather a Saudi", according to Rashwan.

"The Americans are eager to establish a non-Iraqi identity for Zarqawi's successor for political reasons," said Rashwan. "They need a symbol of international jihad (holy war) to justify their occupation of Iraq."

Caldwell said Masri was believed to have signed up to militant Islam in 1982 when he joined Egypt's Islamic Jihad, once led by Zawahiri.

Masri met Zarqawi in Afghanistan in 1999, when they were both at Al-Faruq training camp where he became an explosives expert, making him the main car-bomb maker in Iraq, according to Caldwell.

"He eventually made his way back to Iraq after the fall of the Taliban," Caldwell said.

But Zayat said Dardiri's name was not on any Egyptian list because "most of those who worked with Zarqawi in Afghanistan did not have strong ties with Egyptian organizations out there," he told the Saudi-owned daily Al-Hayat.

And according to Yasser Al-Sirri, an Egyptian dissident and director of the Islamic Observation Center in London, the new Al-Qaeda chief in Iraq is in fact an Iraqi called Abu Hamza al-Baghdadi, another possible alias.

"If confirmed, the choice of an Iraqi would show Al-Qaeda wants to 'Iraqize' the battle, and to keep it going while preserving an international jihadist character," said Sirri.

Many of these deserters are suffering from serious mental health problems, such as post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by prolonged exposure to the horrors of war. Britain's Ministry of Defence recently revealed that in 2005, around 60 soldiers a month were found to be suffering from mental health problems. The total number of cases, 727, equates to almost 10% of the entire British military presence in Iraq - and 66 were so badly affected that they had to be airlifted home. So far around 2500 US and 113 British soldiers have died in Iraq.

One fear is that the recently elected right-wing government in Canada, under the premiership of Stephen Harper, will look less favourably on the US deserters' claims than the previous liberal administration - Harper is a lot closer to the government of US President George W Bush than his predecessor Paul Martin.

So far no US soldiers have been granted refugee status, but the Canadian government is thought to be looking for a politically comfortable solution that allows the deserters to stay in Canada without offending the Bush administration. It is unlikely the deserters would be deported back to the US, but they may be sent to a third country if their appeals fail.

Once a GI deserts, they lose all the perks : health insurance, pension and the right to a college education. When soldiers go on the run in the US, organisations such as GI Rights help and advise them. Peter Laufer, a respected US journalist whose forthcoming book Mission Rejected recounts the lives of Iraq war deserters, says GI Rights is so concerned about being monitored by the state that its volunteers have at times held discussions about soldiers' cases in parking lots where they know they won't be bugged.

"There are people hiding in attics and cellars," says Laufer, "because they are being sought by the military police." GIs who go public with their condemnation of the Iraq war are particularly targeted for arrest .

Once a GI is listed as Awol - absent without leave - their name is put into the Federal Crime Database. That means if they so much as a run a red light and get stopped by a traffic cop their name will be flagged and they will be arrested.

The punishment for desertion is a lengthy spell in military prison, but the US army retains the right to send a deserter before a firing squad to be executed - although that hasn't happened since the end of the second world war.

The US media barely covers the ever-growing phenomenon of desertion, and Laufer's book is tipped to cause a sensation when it reveals just how virulently some American troops loathe the action into which they have been sent.

Laufer says: " The actions of these men and women is great ammunition against those who still support the war. You can't impugn the actions of a soldier who served their country. These people have stood up and said, 'this is wrong, I'm not going to do this any more' in the face of severe penalties. They are brave and heroic and they deserve our support."

Ahmed Khalaf Falah, a farmer who said he witnessed the attack Friday, said three Humvees were manning a checkpoint when they came under fire from many directions. Two Humvees went after the assailants, but the third was ambushed before it could move, he told The Associated Press.

Seven masked gunmen, including one carrying what Falah described as a heavy machine gun, killed the driver of the third vehicle, then took the two other U.S. soldiers captive, the witness said. His account could not be verified independently.

The U.S. military said Sunday it was continuing the search.

"Coalition and Iraqi forces will continue to search everywhere possible, uncovering every stone, until our soldiers are found, and we will continue to use every resource available in our search,'' it said.

Falah also said tensions were high in the area as U.S. soldiers raided some houses and arrested men. He also said the Americans were setting up checkpoints on all roads leading to the area of the attack and helicopters were hovering at low altitudes.

No new raids were announced by the military early Sunday.

The military said Saturday that soldiers at a nearby checkpoint heard small-arms fire and explosions during the attack at 7:15 p.m. Friday, and a quick-reaction force reached the scene within 15 minutes. The force found one soldier dead but no signs of the other two.

"We are currently using every means at our disposal on the ground, in the air and in the water to find them,'' said Caldwell, the spokesman for U.S. forces in Baghdad.

He said blocking positions were established throughout the area within an hour of the attack to keep suspects from fleeing.

Caldwell also said the military was still searching for Sgt. Keith M. Maupin, of Batavia, Ohio, who went missing April 9, 2004.

"We continue to search using every means available and will not stop looking until we find the missing soldiers,'' he said.

Maupin was captured when insurgents ambushed his fuel convoy with the 724th Transportation Co. west of Baghdad. A week later, Arab television network Al-Jazeera aired a videotape showing Maupin sitting on the floor surrounded by five masked men holding automatic rifles.

That June, Al-Jazeera aired another tape purporting to show a U.S. soldier being shot. But the dark, grainy tape showed only the back of the victim's head and did not show the actual shooting. The Army ruled it was inconclusive whether the soldier was Maupin.

Maupin, a 20-year-old private first class at the time of his capture, has been promoted twice since then.

The White House denied visiting Chinese President Hu Jintao the honour of a full state dinner when he visited in April, serving instead a short lunch. Hu was publicly humiliated by a well-known Falun Gong heckler at the White House press conference and by other obvious humiliations. In other words, the White House welcomed Hu with a diplomatic slap in the face.

At the same time, US Vice-President Dick Cheney slapped Russian President Vladimir Putin with the most open attack yet on Moscow's internal human rights policy as well as its energy policy. In a speech in the Baltic state of Lithuania in early May, Cheney accused Russia of energy "intimidation and blackmail".

Washington has repeatedly accused China of "not playing by the rules", in terms of its oil politics, declaring that China is guilty of "seeking to control energy at the source", as though that has not been US energy policy for the past century or so.
Eurasian energy bloc

The significance of taking aim simultaneously at both Russia and China, the two Eurasian giants (with China being the largest investor in US Treasury securities, and Russia being the world's second most developed military nuclear power), reflects the realisation in Washington that all may not be as seamless in the quest for global domination as originally promised by various strategists in and around the Bush administration.

This month, member-nations of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO), led by China and Russia, will reportedly consider inviting observer Iran to full membership. Even if full membership is postponed as has been mooted, the fact remains that Russia and China both want to seal closer cooperation with Iran.

The SCO was founded in June 2001 by China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. It is beginning to look like an energy-financial bloc in Central Asia consciously being developed to serve as a counter-pole to US hegemony.

Russia's state-owned natural gas transport company, Transneft, has consolidated its pipeline control to become the sole exporter of Russian natural gas. Russia has by far the world's largest natural gas reserves and Iran the second largest.

With Iran, the SCO would control the vast majority of the world's natural gas reserves, as well as a significant portion of its oil reserves, not to mention potential control of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow corridor for a majority of Persian Gulf oil-tanker shipments to Japan and the West.

China's energy geopolitics are also in high gear. China's booming economy, with 9% growth, requires massive natural resources to sustain its growth. China became a net importer of oil in 1993. By 2045, China will depend on imported oil for 45% of its energy needs.

On May 26, crude oil from Kazakhstan began to flow into China from a newly completed 1000-kilometre pipeline. It marked the first time oil began being pumped directly into China.

Kazakhstan had been regarded by Washington since the collapse of the Soviet Union as its sphere of influence, with ChevronTexaco, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's old oil company, the major oil developer. In 2005, China's CNPC state oil company bought PetroKazakhstan for US$4.2 billion and will use it to develop oilfields in Kazakhstan.

China is also in negotiations with Russia for a pipeline to deliver Siberian oil to northeast China, a project that could be completed by 2008, and a natural gas pipeline from Russia to Heilongjiang, in China's northeast. China just passed Japan to rank as world's second largest oil importer behind the US.

Beijing and Moscow are also integrating their electricity economies. In late May, the China State Grid Corporation announced it plans to increase imports of Russian electricity fivefold by 2010.
China's push into Africa

In its relentless quest to secure future oil supplies "at the source", China has also moved into traditional US, British and French oil domains in Africa. In addition to being the major developer of Sudan's oil pipeline, which ships some 7% of total China oil imports, Beijing has become more active in the states bordering the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea.

Since the creation of the China-Africa Forum in 2000, China has scrapped tariffs on 190 imported goods from 28 of the least developed African countries, and cancelled $1.2 billion in debt.

Indicative of the way China is doing an end-run around the customary International Monetary Fund-led Western control of African states, China's export-import bank recently gave a $2 billion soft loan to Angola. In return, the Luanda government gave China a stake in oil exploration in shallow waters off the coast. The loan is to be used for infrastructure projects.

In contrast, US interest in war-torn Angola has rarely gone beyond the well-fortified oil enclave of Cabinda, where ExxonMobil, along with Shell Oil, has dominated until recently. That is apparently about to change with the growing Chinese interest.

Chinese infrastructure projects underway in Angola include railways, roads, a fibre-optic network, schools, hospitals, offices and 5000 units of housing developments. A new airport with direct flights from Luanda to Beijing is also planned.

Indirectly, through its support of the Sudan government, China is also a contender in a high-stakes game of potential regime change in neighbouring, oil-rich Chad. Earlier this year, World Bank "tough guy" Paul Wolfowitz was forced to back down from plans to cut off World Bank aid, after a threat of an oil export cut-off by Chad.

ExxonMobil is currently the major oil company active in Chad. But Sudan backs Chadian rebels, who were only prevented from toppling the notoriously corrupt and unpopular regime of President Idriss Deby by the intervention of 1500 French soldiers. Washington has joined with Paris in backing Deby.

A new Sudan-backed regime in Chad would jeopardise the presence of Western oil firms. One can imagine that China just might be willing to step into such a vacuum and help Chad develop its oil exports, especially if the lion's share went to China.

And immediately after his unpleasant diplomatic visit to Washington in April, Hu went on to Nigeria, long regarded by the US as its "oil sphere of interest".

Hu signed a deal under which Nigeria, Africa's largest oil producer, will give China four oil drilling licences in exchange for a commitment to invest $4 billion in infrastructure. China will buy a controlling stake in Nigeria's 110,000-barrel per day Kaduna oil refinery and build railways and power stations, as well as take a 45% stake in developing Nigeria's giant OML-130 offshore oil and gas field.
US hawks alarmed

The curious charge against China of "not playing by the rules" and "trying to secure energy at the source" begins to assume real dimension when these and recent Russian energy moves are taken as a totality.

It's little wonder that some Washington hawks are getting alarmed. Suddenly, the world of potential "enemies" is no longer restricted to the Islam-centred "war on terror". Leading neo-conservative ideologue Robert Kagan wrote a prominent opinion piece on it in the April 30 Washington Post.

Kagan is privy to pretty high-level thinking in Washington. His wife, Victoria Nuland, worked as Cheney's deputy national security adviser until being named US ambassador to NATO. Kagan also co-founded the hawkish Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in the late 1990s to, among other things, advocate a major US military build-up and forced regime change in Iraq.

Kagan charged that China and Russia have emerged as the protectors of "an informal league of dictators" that currently includes the leaders of Belarus, Uzbekistan, Sudan, Venezuela, Iran and Angola, among others, who, like the leaders of Russia and China themselves, resist any efforts by the West to interfere in their domestic political affairs.

"The question is what the United States and Europe decide to do in response", wrote Kagan. "Unfortunately, al Qaeda may not be the only challenge liberalism faces today, or even the greatest."

The mainstream US foreign policy organisation, the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, has also weighed in on the question of Chinese energy pursuits. In an April 5 report, Sino-Russian Energy Ties, the CFR accused the Bush administration of lacking any comprehensive long-term strategy for Africa. The CFR criticised the US focus on "humanitarian issues" such as in Darfur, in western Sudan, demanding instead that the US "act on its rising national interests on the continent". Those interests? The CFR lists oil and gas number one, and growing competition with China as number two.