"One day members of the security forces of Saddam came and said, 'Are you Yousif Muhammed?' " Ahmed said. "I said, 'I am Younis Ahmed.' They told me to come with them. They tortured me for a month in the special security forces building and released me."
U.S. military commanders said they held about 90 "high-value" detainees -- individuals who are either suspected of war crimes or held high-ranking positions in Hussein's government.
U.S. soldiers survey the scene of an explosion in Baghdad that killed two civilian passersby.
(Mohammed Uraibi -- AP)
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In addition, 15 individuals have been classified as high-value criminals and referred to the special tribunal. According to the U.S. legal adviser, one of the three most recently designated for trial is Alwan Bandar. The official declined to say what Bandar had been charged with.
It is not clear when trials of the high-value criminals will begin. The senior U.S. official said reports that they would start next month "should not be trusted." U.S. and Iraqi officials are renovating a building in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone that will be used for tribunal proceedings, but the work is not scheduled to be completed until at least April, U.S. Embassy sources said.
Meanwhile on Saturday, U.S. and Iraqi forces continued to search for insurgents in Anbar province, part of the violent Sunni Triangle region north and west of Baghdad where many Hussein loyalists are based.
Witnesses reported clashes between U.S. forces and armed men in the provincial capital of Ramadi. They said the militants were connected to Abu Musab Zarqawi, whose group, Al Qaeda in Iraq, has been operating from the Malaab and Tameem neighborhoods in western Ramadi.
All the armed men were suicide attackers, and they struck a military convoy at 11 a.m. in Malaab, said Lt. Ali Aidan, of the Iraqi National Guard. He said nine insurgents were killed or wounded and four U.S. troops were killed.
The Marines have captured 155 suspected insurgents and seized several weapons caches during a six-day security operation in Ramadi and neighboring towns, according to the U.S. military. Of those detained, 51 were taken into custody Friday, the military said in a statement.
Hamoudi Hadib, 45, a grocer in Ramadi, said he hopes the U.S. forces kill all of the insurgents.
"They prevent us from working," he said. "If Islam and religion become like this, we don't need it. They hurt us so much. We don't blame the Americans because they insisted on continuing their mission, but we blame those Arabs who do not want to leave our country. They should leave."
In another incident, a U.S. Marine was killed while his unit was conducting operations in Babil province, just south of the capital, the Associated Press reported. And the body of Raiedah Mohammed Wageh Wazan, an anchorwoman for the U.S.-funded Nineveh TV, was found dumped along a Mosul street, six days after she was kidnapped, the news service also said.
Staff writer Caryle Murphy in Baghdad and special correspondent Salih Saif Aldin in Dujail contributed to this report.
