MOSUL, Iraq — There are at least 13 fewer insurgents terrorizing Mosul.

In the overnight hours of Thursday and Friday, soldiers with 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment conducted nine simultaneous raids and cordon-and-searches throughout Mosul.

The unit, known as the “Deuce Four,” captured 13 terrorists, including three foreign fighters who said they’d come to be suicide martyrs, said Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla, the battalion’s commanding officer. The military declined to specify the fighters’ nationality.

The detainees were high on drugs and some weren’t captured without a fight, to include one combative detainee who bit Kurilla.

“They were on drugs, they admitted to it this morning,” he said. Kurilla said he did not know what drugs they had been taking. “They were ... hopped up.”

Soldiers also found a travel itinerary of the foreigners that noted it took them about 30 days to travel to Iraq, which included flying, traveling by car and walking.

Also Friday, Iraqi army forces killed a foreign fighter and two Iraqi insurgents carrying pistols and grenades.

Since Deuce Four arrived in Mosul in October, soldiers have killed nearly 300 insurgents and captured more than 600.

Each time soldiers find a weapons cache in a neighborhood, residents are paraded by so they can see “the dangers [the insurgents] bring into their neighborhoods,” Kurilla said.

“That’s when they start to go ‘not in my neighborhood,’” he said.

Day in and day out, the Deuce Four soldiers patrol Mosul to find holed-up insurgents and their weapons and bomb-making materials, and to drive a wedge between law-abiding residents and the insurgents, said Capt. Paul Carron, Company B commander.

In part, the soldiers bank on the locals’ intolerance of foreign fighters in their city. While residents tend to turn a blind eye toward neighbors wreaking havoc, they’re keen on ratting out foreign insurgents.

“We’re always telling them ‘your voice is more powerful than our weapons,’” Kurilla said.

It also helps that Arab television stations inundate viewers with images of the aftermath of suicide bombers and roadside bombs that kill and maim innocent civilians. A mortar attacks by insurgents on Wednesday, for example, killed two and injured eight, including school children.

The constant replays have more residents seeking to point out where the bad guys hide and where they stash their weaponry, Kurilla said.

But the soldiers’ missions are not all about capturing bad guys.

During the late-night raid into the Isla Zeral neighborhood, Company B soldiers learned about 5-year-old Rhma Taha Ahmed, who suffers from a congenital heart defect that is slowly taking her life.

As promised, at about 7:30 a.m. Friday, soldiers brought a doctor to her family’s home.

Though Rhma was frightened at first of the armed soldiers in vests and helmets, she finally yielded to Dr. (Maj.) Dave Brown’s soft words and touch as he listened to her heart and lung sounds and tapped her hands and feet.

Rhma was born with two holes between the upper and lower chambers of her heart and a ventricle that fails to properly circulate her blood, Brown said after reading a diagnosis written by Iraqi doctors, a good portion of which was written in English.

“This is something that in the United States would have been treated early on, in infancy,” Brown said. The pressure imbalance in the heart eventually will wear it out.

The tips of Rhma’s hands and feet have swollen and turned purple, a symptom called “clubbing” caused by poor blood circulation, he said.

Her parents said they’ve been told repeatedly that the delicate surgery needed to repair the problem does not exist in Iraq.

While he could make no promises that care would be provided, Brown is working to see what services might be available, through U.S. channels or others, to save Rhma, he said.