U.S. Says Zarqawi Aide Caught

American forces in Iraq have captured a key operative of militant leader Abu Musab Zarqawi, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Tuesday.

Myers told the PBS program “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” that Monday’s capture of Abu Abd Aziz, whom he called Zarqawi’s “main leader in Baghdad,” was “going to hurt that operation of Zarqawi’s pretty significantly.”

Myers said Aziz had been picked up “on the battlefield,” but he gave no other details.

In Baghdad, Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari said Iraqi troops were ready to take control of some cities as a first step toward sending home American and other foreign soldiers, but he rejected any timetable for a coalition pullout.

He said security in many of Iraq’s 18 provinces, notably in the Shiite Muslim south and the Kurdish-controlled north, had improved enough that Iraqi forces could maintain order in cities there. He did not specify which cities could be turned over to the Iraqis.

“We can begin with the process of withdrawing multinational forces from these cities to outside the city as a first step that encourages setting a timetable for the withdrawal process,” Jafari said at a news conference with U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick.

Jafari’s comments were aimed partly at defusing growing calls by Sunni Muslim Arabs and others for the Americans to set a date to leave. The prime minister, a Shiite Muslim, told parliament Tuesday that he wanted any withdrawal plan to be “an Iraqi decision with an Iraqi timetable -- not with a terror timetable.”

Underscoring the security crisis, gunmen killed four Iraqi human rights activists and wounded a fifth in their Baghdad office, and a car bomb killed at least three people in the northern city of Kirkuk.

The Baghdad victims belonged to the local International Organization for Human Rights and were shot by several men at their office in the western neighborhood of Jamaa, colleague Jamal Ibrahim said.

“As soon as we entered the office, we saw four dead bodies,” Ibrahim said. “A fifth person was wounded and the neighbors rescued him.” He was taken to a hospital.

After meeting with Jafari, Zoellick flew to Hillah, 60 miles south of the capital, where he watched Iraqi police in drills.

In one scenario, an assault team stormed a bus. Recruits hauled out half a dozen men, shoved them to the ground and cuffed them. The make-believe terrorists were then herded into the back of a pickup truck and driven away.

It was Zoellick’s third trip to Iraq in three months and took place as Iraqis were scurrying to meet an Aug. 15 deadline to draft a new constitution.