The search continues for our missing soldiers in Iraq. And a few new details emerge:

U.S. troops have questioned hundreds of people and detained 11 in the search for three American soldiers feared captured by al-Qaida during a weekend ambush in an insurgent stronghold south of Baghdad, the U.S. military said Tuesday.

“We have conducted more than 450 tactical interviews and detained 11 individuals” as of Monday night, U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Christopher Garver said without elaborating.

“We are working with the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police in searching for our missing soldiers. We’re also communicating with the local population for information, for support and the local population continues to be helpful in providing tips,” Garver said…

…At 9:15 a.m. Tuesday a bomb hidden in a minibus leaving a bus stop on a main road in Mahmoudiya exploded, wounding three Iraqi passengers, police said.

Al-Qaida has been active for years in the string of towns and villages in the area south of the capital. The mostly Sunni region is known as the “triangle of death” because of frequent attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces as well as Shiite civilians traveling to shrine cities in the south.

During the search Monday, U.S. and Iraqi forces exchanged fire with gunmen near the town of Youssifiyah, killing two and injuring four, an Iraqi army officer said.

On Tuesday, an Iraqi interpreter working with the U.S. soldiers said the coalition’s search was focusing on rural areas outside Mahmoudiya and that life was proceeding as normal in the city.

UPDATE: Jim Hoft points to details of those killed and those still missing…

Private First Class Daniel Weston Courneya (19) of Vermontville, Michigan (left) and Sergeant First Class James David Connell, Jr. (40) from Lake City, Kentucky were two of the four American soldiers killed in an attack about 20 miles south of Baghdad on Saturday. An Iraqi translator was also killed in the attack where 3 US soldiers went missing.

The US soldiers that went missing on the weekend near Mahmoudiya, Iraq are from the 2nd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, Ft. Drum, in upstate New York.

The NYTimes has more on the alleged abductors. This is apparent revenge, the Islamic State of Iraq claims, for the killing of al Qaeda big Muharib Abdul Latif al-Jubouri (along with, as Allah noted, leveraging the unrelated atrocity of a horrific rape last year for propaganda value, as an excuse for their own savagery):

The statement from the Islamic State of Iraq was its second regarding Saturday’s attack, and it called the war in Iraq “a competition,” according to a translation by the Site Institute, which tracks jihadist Web sites. The abduction, it suggested, was an effort to even the score after General Caldwell’s announcement earlier this month that American troops had killed Muharib Abdul Latif al-Jubouri, a senior leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. It went on to cite the rape last year of a teenage girl by American troops near where the abduction occurred.

A similar statement was issued during the search for the two American soldiers captured in June. It came from the Mujahedeen Shura Council, an umbrella insurgent group that was a precursor to the Islamic State of Iraq and included Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. It was released roughly a month after a four-day search led to the discovery of the soldiers’ bodies on a booby-trapped road a few miles from where they had been abducted.

In a sign of what might be to come, that statement accompanied a video that showed the soldiers’ mutilated bodies wearing tattered green Army uniforms. One of the soldiers in the video had been decapitated.

Signs of despair are counterbalanced with signs of hope and continued success. On the ground, Michael Yon reports on improvements in Fallujah.

J.D. Johannes reports the good and bad around Baghdad.

Jeff Emanuel reports on embedding and the PR war.

Back at home, NR weighs in on the battle in Washington over the Iraq war funding bill: “No way to win a war.”

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