Stryker Brigade News

One passage mentioned a proposal for a large-scale attack against American troops, according to the interpreters. Another urged attacks on the families of Iraqis thought to be working for the Americans. Another described "how to get money and use the money for jihad," an interpreter said. And still another underscored the importance of "bringing information about who is working for the U.S. forces."

An American commander told embedded journalists not to report other passages - more specific, descriptive and pointed - for fear of jeopardizing efforts to gather intelligence and prevent attacks on American forces.

Suddenly, the night's operation was not over. Soldiers found keys on the suspect and took him the short distance to his two-story home in Old Mosul, a densely populated warren of rundown homes in central Mosul thought to be a haven for hard-core insurgents in this northern city of two million.

They walked inside, through a 15-foot-square courtyard, past two women, an elderly man, a child and a young boy, to another room packed with papers. They moved upstairs, past a flower bed, and found two rooms that contained all sorts of electronic equipment, the troops said.

"There was a large stash of bomb-making material, switches, wires, just a trove of stuff," said the American commander, Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla, whose battalion controls much of western Mosul. "Papers on how to launder money and others that talked about the ineffectiveness of some of their weapons systems against us and how they need to change." A 55-gallon drum of bomb-making material and 2.5 million Iraqi dinars - about $1,700 - was also found, he said.

The papers retrieved from the man in front of the cigarette stand, he said, were "minutes from some type of meeting of terrorist cells where they discussed money laundering, recruitment, weapons effectiveness and future operations."