BAGHDAD - Nearly 1,000 people have been detained in a sweep to break al-Qaida-in-Iraq's sway in Iraq's third-largest city, Mosul, but many of the fighters have fled to nearby areas, where troops are hunting for them, Iraqi officials said Saturday.
Iraq's leaders said the crackdown was successful in depriving the terror network of what has been its most prominent urban stronghold since it lost hold of cities in Iraq's western Anbar province.
But Iraqi officials raised concerns that al-Qaida fighters who fled would regroup elsewhere, as has often happened in the past.
Yassin Majid, an adviser to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, said most of the leading insurgents had fled to the outskirts of Mosul or to a neighboring country amid the operations. He did not name the neighboring country. Mosul is about 60 miles from the Syrian and Turkish borders.
"Operations will continue and the Iraqi army will not leave Mosul until security and stability have been accomplished," he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.
Duraid Kashmola, the governor of Ninevah province where Mosul is the capital, said this week's sweep would "not ease for fear gunmen might return back in strength to the field."
Maj. Gen. Mark Hertling, the top U.S. commander in northern Iraq, whose forces are working with the Iraqi troops in the operation, said he didn't believe significant numbers of militants had escaped. He said Iraqi forces have surrounded the city with a circle of berms and checkpointscontrolling entry and exits.
But he said some al-Qaida leaders, who directed their Mosul followers from outside the city, may have stayed away from Mosul ahead of the sweep to avoid arrest.
"It's been very successful," he said. "I think the combination of the arrests plus the uncovering of a number of weapons caches will reduce the number of attacks in Mosul."
But he warned insurgents could try to strike back in the coming days with suicide bombings in the city.
The sweep was launched Thursday, after five days of preparatory operations and arrests in the city. U.S.-backed Iraqi police and soldiers have been conducting raids on homes and have fanned out with checkpoints on city streets, though no clashes have been reported in the city, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad.
Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani said 1,068 people have been detained over the past week, but 94 were cleared and have since been released. Kashmola said most of those arrested were al-Qaida members.
The assault on the Sunni al-Qaida-in-Iraq group followed two other major crackdowns against Shiite militiamen in the southern city of Basra and the Baghdad district of Sadr City in the past two months. Those two sweeps continue, but uneasy truces with the powerful Shiite Mahdi Army militia have eased the heavy violence they sparked.
Al-Bolani told a gathering in Mosul of some 300 former officers from the Saddam Hussein era that the army and police would make room for them and that al-Maliki was urging them to return. Many in the crowd cheered the announcement.
Al-Maliki returned to Baghdad from Mosul - where he has been overseeing the crackdown - to meet with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who made a surprise visit to Iraq on Saturday.
Pelosi, a top Democratic criticof the U.S.-led war in Iraq, expressed confidence that expected provincial elections will promote national reconciliation.
She welcomed Iraq's progress in passing a budget as well as oil legislation and a bill paving the way for the provincial elections in the fall that are expected to more equitably redistribute power among local officials.
In violence Saturday, a suicide bomber blew herself up near an office for a U.S.-allied Sunni group, then a suicide car bomber struck an Iraqi police patrol heading to the scene in the Diyala provincial capital of Baqouba, northeast of Baghdad.
Police said at least 15 people were wounded in the attacks, including two children.
In London, a former Church of England leader has appealed for militants to release five British civilians kidnapped in Iraq a year ago.
Former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey released a video Saturday addressing the kidnappers as "honorable men" and "men of faith."
Gunmen abducted British management consultant Peter Moore and four security guards in Baghdad on May 29, 2007.
Information for this article was contributed from Baghdad by Hamid Ahmed and Sinan Salaheddin of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 20 on 05/18/2008