U.S. releases Iraqi women; 2 soldiers killed in attacks

The fate of four other female detainees was not immediately clear.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The U.S. military released five Iraqi women detainees Thursday, a move demanded by the kidnappers of an American reporter to spare her life, but an official said the release was coincidental.
The women were freed from U.S. custody and delivered to the home of a senior Sunni Arab politician in Baghdad, where they were returned to their families, according to an Associated Press photographer at the scene. They were later driven away in taxis.
Armed men who abducted Jill Carroll on Jan. 7 in Baghdad have threatened to kill the free-lance reporter for the Christian Science Monitor unless all Iraqi women prisoners were freed.
Waiting to hear
David Cook, the Washington bureau chief for The Christian Science Monitor, said: "We've seen the reports. We're waiting to see if there are hopeful developments in Iraq."
An Iraq Interior Ministry official said the releases could help free Carroll.
"Any announcement may not benefit the case because of its sensitivity, but we can say, God willing, that she will be released," Maj. Gen. Hussein Ali Kamal, the ministry's head of intelligence, told The Associated Press. "The release of the five Iraqi women might assist in releasing Carroll."
The U.S. military announced earlier that the women would be freed as part of a group of about 420 Iraqis to be released Thursday and today from military custody after reviews of their cases determined there was no reason to detain them further.
The military had confirmed it was holding nine Iraqi women. The fate of the remaining four was not immediately clear. Two other women were detained Wednesday in the northern city of Mosul for alleged insurgent activities, the military said Thursday.
Separate attacks
Meanwhile, two U.S. soldiers were killed in separate attacks Wednesday. One was killed and another wounded by a roadside bomb blast south of Baghdad, while a soldier assigned to U.S. Marines operating in western Iraq died from wounds suffered by a rocket attack on his vehicle near Ramadi.
At least 2,238 members of the U.S. military have died since the war began, according to an Associated Press count.
In Washington, President Bush shrugged off a recent Pentagon-contracted report which concluded the Army was overextended and the United States cannot sustain the pace of troop deployments to Iraq long enough to break the back of the insurgency there.
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