Iraq's most wanted killed during pre-dawn raid on Saddam's home town

US claims to have assassinated two senior al-Qa'ida leaders in joint operation with Iraqi forces in Tikrit

Two senior leaders of al-Qa'ida in Iraq, blamed for an upsurge in bombings across the country, have been killed in a raid by US and Iraqi forces.

Abu Ayyub al-Masri and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi died in an attack on a safe house in the northern city of Tikrit, the birthplace of Saddam Hussein and a centre of the Sunni Muslim insurgency. The night-time operation, conducted by American and Iraqi special forces with support from helicopters, took place after the terrorists were located from interceptions of telephone calls and details supplied by informants.

An aide to al-Masri, an Egyptian, and al-Baghdadi's son also died in the firefight, along with an Iraqi soldier. Sixteen people were arrested.

At a news conference in Baghdad yesterday, the Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, produced photographs of dead bodies and declared: "The two most wanted men in the country have been eliminated. The death of terrorism is an important step towards reconstruction."

General Raymond Odierno, the commander of US forces in Iraq, said the killings could be "the most significant blow to the terrorist organisation since the beginning of the insurgency". The US Vice-President, Joe Biden, argued that it was a "potentially devastating" blow to al-Qa'ida in Iraq.

Al-Masri's rise through the ranks of the jihadist group was mirrored by the US government raising the bounty on his head from $50,000 in 2005 to $5m last year. His assassination, and that of al-Baghdadi, is likely to be a source of relief for the Americans and the Iraqis following an upsurge in violence over the past nine months after a period of relative peace which was credited to a troop "surge" led by General David Petraeus.

Many al-Qa'ida attacks were aimed at Iraqi government ministries and increased in tempo in the run-up to national elections in March. Sectarian tensions were heightened when hundreds of Sunni Muslim candidates were banned from taking part because of their previous links to the Ba'ath party of Saddam Hussein.

At the height of the insurgency, Gen Odierno said al-Qa'ida in Iraq was run by up to 10 middle-class Iraqis who had backgrounds in finance and engineering. It was also claimed by US and Iraqi officials that former Ba'athists had joined forces with al-Qa'ida and were using Sunni Ba'athist networks in areas such as Tikrit and Mosul to set up insurgent attacks.

However, Gen Odierno maintained that the al-Qa'ida hierarchy was still taking orders from al-Masri, a former aide to the Jordanian-born leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Al-Zarqawi masterminded a ferocious bombing campaign against coalition forces before he was killed by a US airstrike in 2006. The reaction of America and Iraq to al-Masri and al-Baghdadi's activities has at times been confusing. Iraqi officials announced several times between 2007 and 2009 that al-Masri had been arrested or killed. At one point, a US Army commander, Brigadier-General Kevin Bergner, claimed al-Baghdadi did not exist but was simply a character invented "to put an Iraqi face on the leadership of al-Qa'ida in Iraq".

Al-Masri, also known as Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, was said to have been a member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad group formed in 1982 by Sheikh Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the deputy of Osama bin Laden. Al-Masri arrived in Iraq at the time of the US-led invasion and set up the first al-Qa'ida cells in the country.

An Iraqi political analyst, Hakim al-Ibrahimi, said: "This is a propaganda victory for al-Maliki and his people and will also have a psychological impact on the insurgency ... but this does not mean the violence is over. Others will take their place.

"All the government can do is keep arresting or killing the leadership until the insurgency becomes exhausted."

The many deaths of Abu Ayyub Al-Masri

October 3, 2006

*Two Arab satellite stations report the death in a coalition raid of al-Masri and other suspected militants. The US military said his death was "possible" but DNA tests later ruled it out.

1 May, 2007

*Iraqi officials say al-Masri has been killed in an internal feud – two months after he reportedly died in a shootout. Both reports prove untrue. The US military comments that al-Masri seems to be "killed or caught every month".