"We continue to get closer to this guy, and we want to get him," said US spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson after a report on the Al Arabiya satellite network that Abu Ayyub Al Masri was dead.
Johnson said that some suspected Al Qaeda militants had been killed this week in a US-led operation in Anbar province, an insurgent hotbed west of Baghdad, but when asked if Masri was among them, said: "No."
"The coalition force does not believe that Abu Al Masri, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, has been killed," Johnson said.
"During operations in Anbar in the past couple days, intelligence led to an operation targeting an Al Qaeda cell. This raid resulted in several suspected terrorists being killed," he said. "Although it was initially believed Masri may have been among them, our preliminary investigation indicates it is highly unlikely," he said, adding that another DNA test was expected to "rule out the possibility altogether."
Anbar is in the grip of a violent insurgency led by Sunni groups fighting under Al Qaeda's banner and has proved to be one of the most hostile areas of Iraq for US forces and the embattled coalition government.
In recent weeks, however, US and Iraqi commanders have been increasingly optimistic that they might be turning the tide in Anbar, after a coalition of powerful tribal sheikhs vowed to hunt down foreign Al Qaeda extremists.
There have been several reports of Qaeda fighters being killed by tribal militias, police recruitment is increasing, and Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki's administration has promised that Masri will soon be caught.
National security advisor Muwaffaq Al Rubaie said Sunday that Masri's "days are numbered" after showing the first video images of the Egyptian born militant who replaced former Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Mussab Al Zarqawi, killed in a US air raid in June.
On Friday, Masri, also known as Abu Hamza Al Muhajer, broadcast an Internet audio message threatening a renewed offensive and a campaign to kidnap foreigners.
He has been described as an Egyptian émigré with an extensive knowledge of explosives. The footage showed a bespectacled man with an Egyptian accent explaining how to a rig a car with bombs.
However, despite official optimism in the wake of Zarqawi's death, the number of bomb attacks has not declined. In fact, this week bombings hit their highest levels since the US invasion of 2003.
For the fourth time this year a bomb exploded in Baghdad's bustling Tehran Square Thursday, wounding at least 20 day laborers waiting for work, security and medical officials said.
In the north of the city, a bomb exploded in a mixed Sunni and Shiite district, killing two civilians, according to a security source.
And in Samawa, south of the capital, gunmen murdered two women and a girl from the same Shiite family, in an apparent sectarian attack, police said.
Three people, including a policeman, were killed in a string of shootings in the lawless province of Diyala, the scene of a vicious campaign of sectarian cleansing between rival Sunni and Shiite death squads.
US casualties are also mounting. Four more soldiers were killed Wednesday when their unit was attacked by gunfire and mortars.
Since Monday, 14 US soldiers have been killed, mostly in Baghdad, in a spike in casualties that brought the number killed since March 2003 to 2,729.
Iraqi and US forces have responded with a joint security plan that has brought 15,000 US troops and more than 40,000 Iraqi soldiers and police on to Baghdad's streets.
By Monday, they had "cleared approximately 95,000 buildings, 80 mosques, and 60 muhallas [small administrative districts], detained more than 125 terrorist suspects, [and] seized more than 1,700 weapons," according to the coalition.
House-to-house searches have been cut back during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, however, and Maliki has been reluctant to allow US troops to raid Sadr City, stronghold of the Shiite Mehdi Army militia.
US intelligence officers believe that Mehdi militiamen, who are nominally loyal to the radical anti-American cleric Moqtada Al Sadr, are linked to the death squads that hunt political and sectarian targets.
Sadr is, however, a powerful figure and his supporters are a key component of Maliki's fragile coalition government.
The loyalty of Iraqi security forces has also been in question, with some Shiite-dominated units accused of collaborating with militias and death squads fighting a sectarian war that leaves 100 people dead every day.
Iraq Wednesday demobilized an entire 800-strong police brigade and quarantined them in a US military base where they will receive what a US spokesman said was "anti-militia, anti-sectarian, national unity training."
© 2006 Agence France-Presse
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