AP Photo: Iraqi Prime Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki gestures as he announces during a press conference in...

BAGHDAD - A son of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi is behind a group of foreign and Iraqi fighters responsible for this week's devastating explosion in northern Iraq, a security chief for Sunni tribesmen who rose up against al-Qaida said Saturday.

At least 38 people were killed and 225 wounded last Wednesday when a huge blast destroyed about 50 buildings in a Mosul slum. The next day, a suicide bomber killed the provincial police chief and two other officers as they surveyed the blast site.

Col. Jubair Rashid Naief, who also is a police official in Anbar province, said those attacks were carried out by the Seifaddin Regiment, made up of about 150 foreign and Iraqi fighters who slipped into the country several months ago from Syria.

Naief said the regiment, which is working with al-Qaida in Iraq, was supported by Seif al-Islam Gadhafi, 36, the eldest son of the Libyan leader.

"I am sure of what I am talking about, and it is documented," Naief said, adding that he was "100 percent sure" of the younger Gadhafi's role with the terror group.

A man who answered the phone at Gadhafi's office in Tripoli said Gadhafi was not immediately available for comment on the accusation.

Naief told The Associated Press his information about the Seifaddin Regiment and the younger Gadhafi's purported role came from "reliable sources" maintained by his Anbar Awakening Council within the ranks of al-Qaida in Mosul and elsewhere.

He said the information was passed to the U.S. military two or three months ago.

"They crossed the Syrian border nearest to Mosul within the last two to three months," Naief said of the Seifaddin Regiment. "Since then, they have taken up positions in the city and begun blowing up cars and launching other terror operations."

The Anbar Awakening Council is an alliance of Sunni tribes in the western province that turned against al-Qaida and began working with U.S. forces. The council is credited with the sharp drop in violence in Anbar, once the main base for the insurgents.

Many of the council's fighters are believed to have been insurgents themselves until they began receiving money from the Americans to turn their guns on their former extremist allies.

The U.S. military did not immediately respond to an e-mail request for comment about Naief's claim.

Last Monday, however, The Washington Post reported that U.S. military commanders believed they had underestimated the role of North Africans in the ranks of foreign fighters and suicide bombers in Iraq.

The newspaper quoted U.S. military officials as saying that 19 percent of the foreign fighters come from Libya. Overall, North Africans account for 40 percent of the foreign fighter ranks, the newspaper said.

Seif al-Islam, however, seems an unlikely figure as a sponsor of terrorism. Touted as a reformer, the younger Gadhafi has been reaching out to the West to soften Libya's image and return it to the international mainstream.

Known in Libya as "The Engineer," he won praise last year for helping release five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who were jailed in Libya for allegedly infecting Libyan children with HIV.

Educated at a British university and fluent in English, German and French, he also has gained exposure as head of the Gadhafi International Association for Charitable Organizations, a non-governmental network concerned with issues like human rights and education.

Naief did not explain why the younger Gadhafi would be sponsoring the group of fighters. Seif Gadhafi, however, was quoted by the Austrian Press Agency last year as warning Europeans against more attacks by radical Islamists.

"The only solution to contain radicalism is the rapid departure of Western troops from Iraq as well as Afghanistan, and a solution to the Palestinian question," Gadhafi was quoted as saying.

This week's blasts have drawn attention to the security situation in Mosul, which U.S. commanders describe as the last major urban center with a significant al-Qaida presence since the terror network has been driven from its strongholds in the capital and Anbar province.

The U.S. military is relatively thin across northern Iraq and has signaled no immediate plans to shift American troops from key zones in and around Baghdad.

On Friday, however, the government said it would dispatch several thousand more Iraqi security forces to Mosul in a "decisive" bid to drive al-Qaida in Iraq from the city.

Defense Minister Abdul-Qadir al-Obeidi told reporters Saturday that the first reinforcements would arrive in the city within 24 hours.

Mosul and surrounding Ninevah province have about 18,000 policemen, but only about 3,000 operate in the city of nearly 2 million, according to police spokesman Saeed al-Jubouri.

The U.S. wants to keep Iraqi security forces in the lead as a major test of Washington's long-range plans, which seek to keep a smaller American force in Iraq as backup for local soldiers and police.

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Hussein Al-Hamadi, Iraq - The first sign of the presence of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) looms out of the frozen darkness on the edge of this remote village. A white car is found hidden under a canopy of trees. It's not rigged to explode, but it was used by the insurgents. Inside, they've left behind a list of expenses on a yellow notepad.

For the month of November, the ledger notes that AQI paid snipers 273,000 Iraqi dinars ($230). Roadside bombers got twice that amount. The largest single expense: $3,000 paid to "martyrs" and their families.

The document is topped with an obscure name for the militant cell, and signed simply: "The Management."

Inserted overnight by helicopter earlier this week, US Army soldiers (from Troop A, 2nd Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment) and an Iraqi Army platoon, crept into this village along the Diyala River, 20 miles northeast of Baghdad, hunting for insurgents – and for local villagers willing to take them on. This patrol is part of a broader US-Iraqi military effort in the Diyala Province, the heart of the insurgency in recent months.

The detailed expenses – and the fear on the Iraqi residents' faces in this Al Qaeda stronghold – speak to the insurgents' continued influence here. Yet the hit-and-miss nature of gleaning information and detaining suspects, who often claim ignorance to avert suspicion, makes the mission difficult.

"Everyone is so scared. They don't want to do or say anything," says Capt. Joe Byerly of Savannah, Ga. American troops swept through here last October, and in that three-day operation killed five militants and freed a severely beaten hostage. US officers understand why the locals are hesitant to cooperate.

"They know we will leave, and those people they are scared [that Al Qaeda] will just come right back," says the troop commander, Capt. Dustin Heumphreus, from Austin, Texas.

To prevent AQI's return and allay the villagers' fears, the US and Iraqi troops are trying to create a US-funded band of armed locals, called Concerned Local Citizens, or CLCs, to guard newly erected checkpoints in the area. It's a strategy that has helped quell violence in other parts of Iraq, especially Baghdad.

Later, a Predator drone is called in to destroy the white car with Hellfire missiles – so it won't be used again by the insurgents. They also take out another car without license plates that had excited the US Army's explosives-sniffing dog. Other sites yield more lists, including one with some names crossed out – perhaps individuals already assassinated, or militants killed.

"There are many bad guys here," says the senior Iraqi Army officer, 1st Lt. Ahmad Ashab Ahmad, as his 25 soldiers lead the search, going door to door with the Americans and working from two lists of potential suspects. "The US 'Most Wanted,' the first, second, third, fourth and fifth on the lists, they are all here."

The village of Hussein al-Hamadi is largely cut off from US or Iraqi military support by roads seeded with bombs, and masked men of Al Qaeda in Iraq often transit the village, using the overgrown areas between the village and the river as a haven.

Once half Sunni and half Shiite, the village a year ago witnessed Sunni militants systematically "cleanse" the area of all Shiites, blowing up their houses to discourage any from returning. The dramatic results are mounds of rubble similar to villages ethnically cleansed in the 1990s throughout the Balkans.

"Up until yesterday, Al Qaeda were here," says one fearful man, as his children raced to gather documents from the family truck to prove ownership. "Then they heard that coalition forces were coming, and they left."

US soldiers asked him to call if he sees anything suspicious, but he refuses, initially, to accept the phone numbers of a help line. Others in the village refuse point blank, saying that Al Qaeda in Iraq had swept through in the past, checking every mobile phone for known coalition numbers.

"If you be our eyes, we will be your guns," Captain Heumphreus tells the farmer.

This man finally relents, agreeing to help. But he is shaking with fear. His family has been whisked into a back room so as not to hear the exchange. "Before coalition forces came, I was too afraid to speak," he explains in hushed tones. "But now I will talk."

"It's dangerous," warns another older man standing at his metal gate, his family out of sight. "I don't want to talk about it. I don't know anything about Al Qaeda. They come here with covered faces, and they go."

The rubble from Shiite houses is not the only thing left behind by Al Qaeda in Iraq fighters, who villagers say frequently come from the east side of the river.

Over three days, US forces come across several weapons caches, take gun and mortar fire from across the river, and call in airstrikes to destroy a bunker with a grass-covered trapdoor and bedrolls in it. Neither the weapons caches nor the bunker are rigged to blow, suggesting the militants never expected these sites between the village and the river to be found.

As troops move through the reeds and the pomegranate and citrus groves along the banks of the river, they find rich pickings. Caches include rockets, antitank mines, 15 hand-held radios, 3,000 feet of detonation cord, 25 remote-fire initiation devices, bulk explosives, and a video camcorder with three tapes. "We could have spent a month out there, searching and finding stuff. There is so much," says Staff Sgt. Chris Jackson, a US Air Force explosives expert from Albuquerque, N.M. "To find a cache like that in this day and age is a big deal, because [AQI] are so much better at running and hiding."

The Americans detain one man who pops up on one of their watch lists, provided by a local sheikh. Another man is taken in after several rolls of copper wire (often used in making roadside bombs) are found in his house. At one point during the sweep, a man is handcuffed and his eyes covered with a band of cloth after telling several conflicting stories about the flatbed truck in his driveway.

"I swear by God I am not Al Qaeda!" the man pleads with the senior Iraqi officer. At first he claims masked men dropped off the vehicle, hid the license plates, and then disappeared. He says "the terrorists" also took his identity card.

But then an identity card appears. It's for the Diyala Province health authority, valid throughout 2008. And as the arrest is made, the man tries to throw off his jacket. Inside the pocket are the keys for the truck. "A friend gave it to me!" the man insists. The Iraqi and US troops laugh at the changing story. A woman and group of children wail as the man is led away.

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The troop increase ordered by President George W. Bush in January began to show results over the summer, and improving trends in security have received commensurate coverage. The Pew researchers found that positive assessments of the expanded American military operations had begun to rise in November.

The survey of journalists and the study of their reports are at www.journalism.org.

"It is obvious that many of the stories in print and television now have a more positive tenor; it ties directly to what is happening on the ground," said Lieutenant Colonel James Hutton, public affairs officer for Multinational Corps-Iraq and also the spokesman for Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, commander of day-to-day military operations.

"I'm satisfied that the majority of reporters on the ground want to get the story right and are responsive when their reporting is seen as less than accurate and we call them on it," said Hutton, who is nearing the end of his second tour of duty in Iraq.

Setting the tone from the top, Petraeus decided that managing the military's media mission required a high-ranking career public affairs officer, and he assigned Rear Admiral Greg Smith, previously chief of information for the United States Navy, to be director of communications for Multinational Force-Iraq, the top military command structure in the country. Smith, the first one-star public affairs officer in Baghdad, acknowledged that troops who had served previously in Iraq "may have lived through a time when it seemed that all that was being reported was negative news, even though they were doing so much good on any given day that was not being reported."

"I think there was a period time in the past in which reporting was behind reality," Smith said. "Today, that gap between perception and reality has closed, if not completely."

Lieutenant Colonel Scott Bleichwehl, public affairs officer for Multinational Division-Baghdad for the past 15 months, described one concern heard often from officers in Iraq - the lack of reporters covering the war as it entered another decisive period during the troop increase.

"In general, I thought the majority coverage was very accurate and fair," said Bleichwehl, who has served twice in Iraq. "There were not always enough reporters there full time to provide the complete story of what was going on in a city with seven million people, much less the rest of the country."