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By Richard A. Oppel Jr. , New York Times and James Glanz
BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. and Iraqi troops raided a prominent Sunni mosque in Baghdad yesterday, killing at least three Iraqis in an operation that appeared to be aimed at stopping sermons that incited insurgent violence.
In the northern city of Mosul, Iraqi commanders staged numerous raids in search of rebel hideouts as up to a dozen decapitated bodies were found strewn about the city.
At the mosque, called Abu Hanifa, blood was splattered on the floor after what witnesses described as a chaotic raid in which Iraqi soldiers opened fire after becoming involved in a melee with enraged worshippers.
U.S. military officials either did not respond to requests for comment on the incident or said they had no information on it. But on Thursday, a spokesman for Prime Minister Ayad Allawi said that imams who incited violence would be arrested.
At the time of the raid, said Louay Ibrahim, an Iraqi police officer who was praying there, the imam at the mosque was giving a sermon that urged his audience to make Mosul and other Iraqi cities into embattled places "like Fallujah."
In Mosul, after reports that headless bodies were being found around the city, U.S. troops were not able to confirm the precise number of corpses. Last night, an official with the Army battalion that controls the most dangerous and insurgent-ridden portions of western Mosul said the beheaded bodies had not yet been recovered because of concerns they might be booby-trapped to trigger explosions.
Some of the bodies are thought to have been Iraqi soldiers killed for collaborating with Americans. A 35-year-old businessman, Senan Shukri, said he had seen the killing of two Iraqi soldiers who were surrounded in a public square in Mosul and decapitated by insurgents who warned that anyone attempting to remove the bodies would be treated similarly.
The discovery of the beheaded bodies followed the posting of a statement on a Web site operated by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, claiming that two officers from the Iraqi National Guard had been publicly beheaded in Mosul.
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