U. S. MILITARY TO RELEASE FIVE IRAQI WOMEN

Jan 26, 7:14 AM (ET)

By SAMEER N. YACOUB

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - The U.S. military said Thursday it would release five Iraqi women detainees, a move demanded by the kidnappers of an American reporter to spare her life. A U.S. official said the release had nothing to do with the kidnappers' demand.

Meanwhile, a U.S. soldier was killed and another wounded by a roadside bomb blast south of Baghdad on Wednesday, while two Iraqi government employees were gunned down Thursday by drive-by militants in separate attacks in the northern city of Kirkuk.

The Shiite bloc set to dominate the next parliament, the United Iraqi Alliance, will also decide on its nominee for prime minister in the "coming few days," top Shiite official Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi said.

Abdul-Mahdi is among four prominent Shiites mentioned as possible premiers. Others are the current prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari; nuclear physicist Hussain al-Shahrastani and Nadim al-Jabiri of the Fadhila party, a religious group whose spiritual leader is al-Sadr's late father, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr.

The Iraqi women will be freed Thursday and Friday as part of a release of 419 Iraqis officials concluded there was no reason to continue holding, said Lt. Col. Guy Rudisill, spokesman for the U.S. detention command.

Armed men abducted Jill Carroll, a freelance reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, on Jan. 7 in Baghdad and threatened to kill her unless all Iraqi women prisoners were released.

The U.S. military confirmed last week it was holding nine Iraqi women. On Thursday, however, the military said it had detained two more women for alleged insurgent activities in the northern city of Mosul.

Detainees are regularly freed in Iraq following reviews of their cases, a process that can take months, and U.S. officials have said the upcoming releases were part of that routine procedure and not linked to Carroll's case.
A top Iraqi official and the mother of one of the Iraqi female detainees confirmed the imminent releases, saying they were expecting them to occur Thursday.

Busho Ibrahim Ali, the deputy justice minister, said five female detainees were expected to be released from the Camp Cropper detention center on a U.S. base near Baghdad International Airport.

Ali said the women would be brought to the heavily fortified Green Zone, where the Iraqi government and U.S. Embassy are based in Baghdad, and handed over to a senior Sunni Arab political leader and received by their families.

Detainees are usually transported from detention centers to a Baghdad bus station or to towns near their homes and let go.

Siham Faraj, a mother of 28-year-old Hala Khalid, who was arrested with her brother on Sept. 24 during a dawn raid by U.S. forces on their Baghdad home, said she was waiting anxiously to see her daughter and hoped it would lead to Carroll's safe release.

"We are happy and we thank God for this blessing," Faraj told The Associated Press. "I call upon the kidnappers of the American reporter to release her because she is as innocent as Hala."