"There are going to be a series of hot and cold days," Nevers said in a telephone interview. "Several thousand forces are participating, but they're not all sweeping across the province at once."
The operation involves about 3,100 Marines, more than 1,000 Iraqi security troops and 900 members of the Black Watch, a British infantry regiment. In 11 early-morning raids Tuesday in Jabella, about 50 miles south of Baghdad, forces captured 32 suspected insurgents and uncovered caches of munitions, Nevers said.
Among those sought by U.S. forces are insurgent leaders believed to have operated out of Fallujah. Those men -- Abdullah Janabi, Omar Hadid and Abu Musab Zarqawi -- all apparently escaped this month's U.S.-led offensive in Fallujah, and military officials have speculated that Zarqawi headed north, perhaps to Mosul.
In an audiotape purportedly made by Zarqawi and posted on the Internet on Wednesday, the Jordanian criticized Muslim scholars for not speaking out against U.S. actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The authenticity of the tape could not be confirmed.
"You have let us down in the darkest circumstances and handed us over to the enemy. . . . You have quit supporting the holy warriors," he said, according to the Associated Press, which transcribed the tape. "Hundreds of thousands of the nation's sons are being slaughtered at the hands of the infidels because of your silence."
Mollen, the slain American diplomat, joined the State Department in 2002 and went to Iraq in 2003, working originally for the Coalition Provisional Authority, according to a State Department spokesman. An official biography said Mollen was working to rebuild Iraq's 20 major universities and 40 technical institutes, research centers and colleges.
In an interview before he left for Iraq about a year ago, Mollen told a reporter for a State Department publication that his goals included rebuilding academic buildings, classrooms, libraries and laboratories, as well as building Western-style graduate business schools in Iraq. He also sought to set up online digital video conferencing at Iraqi universities, so students and teachers could communicate with their contemporaries in the United States.
"Jim was a great guy, and a beloved son, and an idealist that was trying to do something for the world, and he got shot to death for it," said his father, John Mollen.
Mollen's mother, Anne, said her son "was very, very much into the work he was doing in Iraq. . . . He was working very closely with the school systems and the universities, trying to get them back up and running."
Anne Mollen said that U.S. officials told her that her son had just left a meeting at Iraq's Education Ministry and was driving away in his car when another car pulled up alongside and a gunman inside shot him. He died instantly, and no one else was hurt, she said.
Mollen was to have returned home for good on Dec. 1, she said. "We were expecting him for Christmas, and it's just devastating."
Staff writers Rebecca Dana and Thomas E. Ricks in Washington and special correspondent Naseer Nouri in Baghdad contributed to this report.
