al-Baghdadi a fictional character

BAGHDAD ?- In March, he was declared captured. In May, he was declared killed, and his purported corpse was displayed on state-run TV. But Wednesday, Omar al-Baghdadi, the supposed leader of an al-Qaida-affiliated group in Iraq, was declared nonexistent by U.S. military officials, who say he is a fictional character created to give an Iraqi face to a foreign-run terror group.

In reality, an Iraqi actor has been used to read statements attributed to al-Baghdadi, who since October has been identified as the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq, said U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner.

Bergner said the information came from a man whom U.S. forces captured July 4 and who was described as the highest-ranking Iraqi within the Islamic State of Iraq. The detainee, identified as Khaled Abdul-Fattah Dawoud Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, has served as a propaganda chief in the organization, a Sunni insurgent group that claims allegiance to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida.

According to Bergner, Mashadani helped create Islamic State of Iraq as a "virtual organization" that is essentially a pseudonym for al-Qaida in Iraq, another group that claims ties to al-Qaida. The front organization was aimed at making Iraqis believe that al-Qaida in Iraq is a nationalistic group, even though it is led by an Egyptian and has few Iraqis among its leaders, Bergner told a news conference.

"The Islamic State of Iraq is the latest effort by al-Qaida to market itself and its goal of imposing a Taliban-like state on the Iraqi people," he said.

Islamic State of Iraq had been widely described as an umbrella organization made up of several insurgent groups, including al-Qaida in Iraq.

There was no way to confirm the military's claim, which comes at a time of heightened pressure on the White House to justify keeping U.S. troops in Iraq. Critics of the Bush administration say he has been trying to provide that justification by linking the broader-based al-Qaida to the conflict in Iraq, even though Bin Laden's organization had no substantial presence here until after the U.S. invasion of March 2003.

"The same people that attacked us on September the 11th is the crowd that is now bombing people" in Iraq, President Bush said Tuesday.