Operation goes on in Iraq to net insurgents: Bremer

California national guardsman Joel Dirks of San Francisco patrols near the Golden Gate Bridge Sunday in San Francisco. The US raised its national threat level from "elevated" to "high", saying the threat of an end of year holiday attack by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network was as great as before the September 11, 2001 strikes. PHOTO: AFP

"We've been arresting quite a number of his cronies and colleagues, including one last night," Bremer, the US civil adminstrator for Iraq, said in an interview with NBC television.

"We're getting some very useful opportunities in the last week or 10 days now to try to wrap up these leaders of the groups that are attacking our soldiers over there."

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On Sunday General Richard Myers, head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said hundreds of people -- including leaders of the insurgency against US-led forces -- have been detained in Iraq following the detention last weekend of the deposed Iraqi president.

Myers told CNN television that some of the information had come from the briefcase seized when US forces found Saddam hiding in a hole under a farmhouse near his hometown of Tikrit.

"With the capture of Saddam Hussein, we learned a little bit more about how they're organized and some of the individuals involved," said the general, who has just returned from a visit to Iraq.

"And what you see now is forces taking advantage of that intelligence and going out and rounding up people. We've got over 200 detainees so far."

Myers told Fox News television "we think they're some of the leadership of this insurgency, absolutely, some of the cell leaders."

While the information has proved valuable to US intelligence, the deposed Iraqi president has not provided it willfully.

"He has not been particularly cooperative," Bremer told NBC on Monday, "but we have been able to exploit some of the information, the materials that we have uncovered in the course of the last week in this battle to see down these insurgents.

"I think we will find in the months ahead that that's going to be quite useful to us."

Meanwhile, leaders of the US-installed Iraq leadership met Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday for talks on Baghdad's hefty debt to Moscow and the fate of multi-billion-dollar Russian oil contracts.

"Russian companies are ready to actively work in Iraq," Putin told the most senior delegation from Baghdad to visit Russia since the US-led war in Iraq, which Moscow fiercely opposed.

"According to preliminary information, the level of investment in Iraq by Russian companies can reach four billion dollars in the very near future," Putin said.

The delegation from the Iraqi Governing Council is led by current head Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and includes Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani.