Fox: Iraqis Nab Alleged Top Terror Financier Fox: Iraqis Nab Alleged Top Terror Financier

Apparently last night Iraqi security forces arrested Yasir Sabhawi Ibrahim, son of Saddam Hussein's half brother Sabhawi Ibrahim Hasan al-Tikriti in an apartment in Baghdad, after the Syrians pushed him out of the country and then told the U.S. where he was.

Ibrahim was supposedly the #1 financeer of terrorists in Iraq and the #2 Baathist terrorist leader, reporting directly to Younis al-Ahmad, the leader of the Iraqi born terrorists, and was the high level connection between the former Baathists and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who heads Al Qaeda in Iraq and leads the foreign born terrorist infiltrating into Iraq.

This is interesting in a couple respects, esp. coming just a couple days after the recent elections, where the terrorists were far less able to disrupt things than they had been during earlier elections.

Probably the most notable is that even though Syria wouldn't turn him directly over to the U.S. or Iraq (as they had his father), they were willing to cooperate enough to push him out and then give his location to the U.S. IMO, this means that Syria has been under enormous pressure to cooperate, and the pressure is paying off. It should be noted that the combined US/Iraqi operations just east of the two countries' joint border may have pushed things a little bit in the right direction.

Secondly, this is further evidence that the insurgency is starting to fall apart. These arrests and arrest attempts ending in the death of terrorist leaders who try to shoot back are coming more and more frequently. That is very good news and is a good deal a result of ever higher levels of Iraqi involvement in security matters.

Indeed, it should be noted here, he was apprehended by Iraqi security forces. Not American ones. I am sure we had a Quick Response Team available if his men started to shoot back with a lot of heavy weapons. And the Iraqis may have had an American advisor or two along. But they did the heavy lifting here. They put their lives on the line, and it paid off.

My one worry is that maybe this arrest was announced too soon, for (Iraqi) political purposes. In the past, this sort of thing has been delayed for a couple of days so that there is a chance to roll up close accomplises before they figure out what happened.