By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 5, 2007

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."

To Infanti, the battalion commander, it is a hunt fraught with frustration as he sifts through misinformation and dead-end leads. Attempts at paying local residents for information, potentially a simple transaction, have been hindered because many people are wary of being found carrying American dollars. Since Iraqi currency for distribution has not yet arrived at his outpost, he said, soldiers have poured water on U.S. dollars and crunched them up to try to make them appear old and worn. But the larger problem the soldiers face is a sprawling rural landscape and a frightened, distrustful population.

"They all lie. Survival. Whatever they think you want to hear, they'll tell you. Because they don't want you to shoot them," Infanti said.

Over the course of the search, three soldiers from his brigade have been killed, and Infanti must keep the others focused on the task despite their grief.

"You go outside the wire and you start daydreaming, you're going to get killed. I tell 'em if you got to cry, you go in the port-a-potty, or go inside your sleeping bag, but you can't afford to do it outside the wire. Otherwise there will be a lot more memorials to go to," he said.

The soldiers fought to control their emotions Monday afternoon during the service for Pfc. Matthew A. Bean, 22, of Pembroke, Mass., who died May 31 after being shot by a sniper on May 19, the eighth day of the search, Infanti said. The service was held at a nearby base in Mahmudiyah, inside a hangar with swallows darting through the rafters. A procession of speakers remembered the former landscaper and arborist for his many nicknames, including "beaner" and "frijol"; for how he loved to dance and play the guitar; and for his constant good humor amid their grueling work.

"His death will leave those who were close to him with an emptiness that will not ever be filled," the chaplain said at the ceremony.

Meanwhile on Monday, U.S. military officials offered new details about the British financial consultant and four British bodyguards abducted May 29 from a Finance Ministry building in Baghdad. A senior U.S. military official said there was a "potential link" between the captors in this case and the Shiite militia cell that conducted a brazen attack in Karbala in January that killed five American soldiers. In that incident, gunmen wearing U.S. military-style uniforms and driving sport-utility vehicles captured the soldiers inside a government compound.

Last month, the Americans killed the suspected ringleader of that group, Azhar al-Dulaimi, in a shootout in Baghdad. The U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the kidnapping of the British "could very well be in retaliation" for the killing of Dulaimi.

Correspondent John Ward Anderson and special correspondent Naseer Nouri in Baghdad contributed to this report.