BAGHDAD — U.S. and Iraqi forces raided a mosque and a second building Friday in Baghdad in the hunt for a missing U.S. soldier, Army officials said.
The soldier was not found at either location, said Lt. Col. Steve Stover, a spokesman for Multinational Division Baghdad.
The two raids were based on specific intelligence about the possible whereabouts of the soldier — whose identity has been withheld by the Army for security reasons — but both turned out to be what the military calls a “dry hole.”
The first raid took place at about 10:30 a.m. in the Rusafa district of the city at a building officials thought was a mosque, but when entered proved to be an “Office of the Martyr Sadr” building, Stover said. Though the missing soldier wasn’t found, U.S. and Iraqi forces detained three men and seized a cache of small arms at the site, including rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns and a sniper rifle, Stover said.
The second raid took place at a mosque in the Shiite Sadr City area around 11:30 a.m., he said. The soldier, an Iraqi-American working as a translator for U.S. forces, has been missing since Monday, when he was abducted from the home of relatives in Baghdad, according to media reports.
Meanwhile, the mother of the missing soldier appealed to his captors to show him mercy as a fellow Muslim, according to reports from the al-Sharqiyah TV channel in Baghdad.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.