The U.S. military reported that two 101st Airborne soldiers were killed Thursday by indirect fire ¡ª usually meaning mortars ¡ª at the Speicher operating base farther north up the Tigris. The deaths, which Loomis said were not directly related to the sweep, were the second and third involving division soldiers on the day Operation Swarmer began.

At least 2,314 American military personnel have died since the Iraq war began in the early hours of March 20, 2003.

The security net thrown down by Swarmer, described as the largest Iraq operation by helicopter-borne troops in three years, has angered residents of the area, which was a political stronghold of the Sunni-dominated government of Saddam Hussein ousted by the 2003 invasion.

The Iraqi Red Crescent said it sent tents and food to al-Jelam, 15 miles northeast of Samarra, to help people driven from their village by the operation.

One leading Sunni Arab, Iraqi presidential security adviser Wafiq al-Samaraie, urged that the operation ease restrictions on traffic across Samarra's vital Tigris River bridge, and cease "disarming the people of Samarra of their own authorized weapons."

He said the arms were needed to confront the "Zarqawi terrorists."

Many Sunni spokesmen differentiate between what they see as an Iraqi nationalist resistance against the U.S. occupation and Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in Iraq, many foreign, led by people like Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian allied with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida.

"Many young people were detained, some of them innocent, and I call for their quick release," al-Samaraie told a TV interviewer. But he also called on Samarra's youths "to lay down their arms and join the political process."

A Sunni leader in Parliament, Tarek al-Hashimi, told reporters the operation has come at too delicate a moment in Iraq. "There was no need to escalate military acts as the country is passing through a dangerous political dilemma," he said Friday.

But Iraq's Shiite interim prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, described the sweep as a necessary "pre-emptive operation."

In other action, Iraqi counterinsurgency troops staged a pre-dawn raid near Baqouba, 27 miles north of Baghdad, touching off a clash in which two gunmen were killed, one was wounded and 18 were arrested, including a Jordanian, Brig. Saman al-Talabani said.

Along with ammunition and arms, the soldiers seized computer discs of fatwas ¡ª edicts ¡ª issued by Islamic clerics to kill Iraqi police and soldiers, al-Talabani said.

A Sunni extremist leader was captured south of Baghdad along with five other "dangerous terrorists" and confessed to killing hundreds of Shiite Muslims in recent months, police Lt. Col. Falah al-Mohammedawi said. He identified the alleged ringleader as Mohammed al-Janabi.