Insurgent Video Claims Captured U.S. Soldiers Are Dead

A video appearing on the Internet included images purportedly showing the ID cards of two American soldiers captured May 12: Pvt. Byron W. Fouty, 19, of Waterford, Mich., and Spec. Alex R. Jimenez, 25, of Lawrence, Mass. (Site Institute Via Associated Press)

MAHMUDIYAH They have taken the thumbprints and retinal scans from more than 1,000 people. They have locked down three suspected attackers in American custody. They have dispatched 4,000 of their own soldiers and 2,000 Iraqis to traverse 32 search zones day after day in the heat and the dust of the patchwork fields and palm groves along the shore of the Euphrates River.

But 23 days after a deadly ambush south of Baghdad, there are two things the searchers still don't have: Spec. Alex R. Jimenez and Pvt. Byron W. Fouty. On Monday, a shaky 10-minute, 41-second video purporting to show their military identification badges appeared on an Internet Web site. A narrator said the soldiers were dead.

U.S. military officials said the video offered no proof of the soldiers' fate, and their comrades near Mahmudiyah remained undeterred. "I'll find 'em," their battalion commander, Lt. Col. Michael Infanti, said with quiet defiance while standing on the roof of his makeshift base 400 meters from the site of the attack. "I ain't stopping till they kill me or send me home."

The video that surfaced Monday purports to depict the May 12 ambush near Yusufiyah that led to the killing of four Americans and one Iraqi army interpreter and the abduction of three others. The body of one of the missing soldiers, Pfc. Joseph J. Anzack Jr., 20, of Torrance, Calif., was found 11 days later in the Euphrates River several miles south of the ambush site.

The undated video, released Monday by the Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella group believed to have been created by the Sunni insurgent organization al-Qaeda in Iraq, offers little indication whether Fouty, 19, of Waterford, Mich., or Jimenez, 25, of Lawrence, Mass., are alive or dead, a contrast with other such videos showing the execution or corpses of abductees. The video shows an apparent pre-attack planning session, where a group of men in black masks stand outdoors in front of a diagram.

Then the video cuts to a dark, chaotic scene of what sounds like gunfire and explosions accompanied by images of leaping flames. In the ambush, two Humvees did catch fire after the insurgents attacked them with small arms and explosives. The video ends with footage of what appear to be Fouty and Jimenez's identification badges, as well as a pistol and credit cards.

Above the ID card photos of the two soldiers, Arabic script reads: "Bush is the reason for the loss of your prisoners."

A male voice, speaking in Arabic, cited concern that a prolonged search would cause harm to "our Muslim brothers, children, women and old men," and said that the group "decided to put an end to this matter and announce their killing to cause bitterness to God's enemies."

"Because you disdain to give us the corpses of our dead, so we will not give you the corpses of your dead, and their residence will be under the soil, God willing," the speaker continues.

U.S. military officials condemned the insurgent tactics but did not dispute the veracity of the video. Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, a U.S. military spokesman, said in a statement that "we are further analyzing the video, however it doesn't appear to contain definitive evidence indicating the status of our missing soldiers."

The U.S. military has followed up on more than 400 leads during the search, but the number of intelligence tips, once pouring in at a rate of as many as 60 a day, had dwindled to six by Monday, said Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the commander overseeing the search.

"It is concerning that three-plus weeks into this, there's no indication of proof of life," he said. "Over time you get less and less intelligence. But the important part is we keep looking."