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US Pounds Falluja Diehards, Violence in North
33 minutes ago
By Michael Georgy and Fadel al-Badrani
FALLUJA, Iraq (Reuters) - U.S. artillery pummeled Falluja on Wednesday and troops hunted guerrillas still fighting days after Washington said its offensive had destroyed rebel control of the Sunni Muslim city west of Baghdad.
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Further north, where violence has surged since the U.S. assault on Falluja began last Monday, 15 Iraqis were killed and 22 wounded in the oil refining town of Baiji. A suicide car bomber rammed a U.S. convoy, prompting troops to open fire.
U.S. officers in Falluja said Marines were "cleaning up" Iraqi and foreign Islamists and Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) loyalists, and Iraq (news - web sites)'s interim government said some 1,600 rebels lay dead.
Mortar fire and heavy explosive rounds crashed on areas where insurgents were believed still to be holding out.
There was trouble in the heartlands of the formerly dominant Sunni Muslim minority, where some fear an election due in January will hand national power to the Shi'ite majority.
After the bombing in Baiji, U.S. troops fought insurgents and sealed off the oil refinery to protect it.
Witnesses said the bomb, which blew up in a market area near the city center, damaged a U.S. armored vehicle and wounded some soldiers, prompting them to open fire.
A U.S. military spokesman confirmed that a suicide bomber drove into a U.S. convoy but had no information on casualties.
In Ramadi, just west of Falluja, nine Iraqis were killed and 15 wounded when U.S. forces confronted large groups of rocket- and mortar-firing gunmen who fanned out through the streets, hospital officials and witnesses said.
Iraq's third city Mosul, another Sunni stronghold in the north, was quiet after days of clashes. But the road north from Baghdad remained dangerous and three Turkish truck drivers were killed in two ambushes, police said.
Iraq's fledgling security forces, set up under U.S. control to replace Saddam's discredited authorities, were targeted again. But for once, a group of unarmed police recruits was able to outwit guerrillas who have killed dozens of their comrades.
Held up by gunmen at a hotel in Rutba on their way home from training in Jordan, 35 recruits from the southern, Shi'ite city of Kerbala hid their police papers pretending to be businessmen, Kerbala's police chief said. After three hours, the gunmen left.
A NATO (news - web sites) official said on Wednesday the organization approved a detailed plan under which it will train some 1,000 Iraqi army officers a year at a proposed military academy outside Baghdad.
INSURGENT LEADERSHIP
Washington has said senior militants, including Jordanian al Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, probably escaped Falluja before it was attacked.
It is not clear how widely coordinated insurgent activity is, so it is hard to assess whether violence in other Sunni towns has been led by figures formerly based in Falluja or is simply a reaction to events there.
An Iraqi freelance journalist working for al Arabiya television and the Associated Press has been detained by U.S. troops in Falluja since last week, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said on Wednesday. The U.S. military said it was not aware of any such detention.
More widely, the bloodshed in Falluja, including the alleged shooting dead of an unarmed, wounded guerrilla in a mosque by a U.S. Marine has provoked dismay among many in Iraq and the Arab world, where President Bush (news - web sites) hoped Saddam's overthrow would foster stability.
One of the most prominent critics of last year's U.S.-led invasion spoke out again on Wednesday:
"I'm not at all sure that one can say the world is safer," said French President Jacques Chirac on the eve of a visit to Bush's closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair (news - web sites).
Britain on Wednesday rejected an estimate by U.S. researchers that some 100,000 Iraqi civilians may have died as a result of the war, agreeing with an Iraqi government figure of a much smaller body count.
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said the estimate, in a report published late last month by British medical journal The Lancet, was based on imprecise data. London supports an estimate from Iraq's Ministry of Health that 3,853 civilians were killed and 15,517 injured between April and October this year, Straw said in a statement. Those figures may include insurgents.
The family of a kidnapped British aid worker, who said on Tuesday she was probably dead, were seeking the return of her body after a video seemed to show her being shot in the head.
It has never been clear who seized Margaret Hassan in Baghdad a month ago nor where she was being held.
(Additional reporting by Lin Noueihed in Baghdad and Sabah al-Bazee in Baiji)
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