At least four people were killed and 13 wounded when United States forces — using tanks, artillery and planes — made a new assault on Iraq’s flashpoint city of Fallujah early on Monday, with fighter jets blowing up a civilian car and house, medics said.
Four dead bodies, ravaged by the missile strike, were taken straight to the cemetery for burial after a US warplane struck a civilian car driving along a new motorway west of Fallujah.
Witnesses said the four had been travelling in the car when it was blown up. Three men who were by the side of the road when the missile struck were injured in the attack, confirmed a hospital doctor.
Earlier, at least 10 people were wounded, including two women, when US artillery and tanks pounded the northern Fallujah districts of al-Geghigh and al-Shurga from around 4am, the same doctor said.
The shelling lasted for nearly two hours before a US plane struck houses in al-Shurga.
One house was completely flattened by the missile and two others were partially destroyed, said an AFP reporter, as ambulances ferried the wounded to hospital.
Heavy sniper fire and sporadic shelling continued to reverberate in the northern outskirts of the city as US warplanes circled overhead at around 8:20am and deafening explosions could be heard coming from the same area.
There was no immediate comment from the US military, which instead confirmed that an unmanned drone crashed in the Fallujah area on Sunday morning, citing mechanical failure as the most likely cause of the crash.
The US air force had relentlessly pounded the extremist Sunni Muslim militant stronghold last week after seven marines and three Iraqi national guardsmen were killed in a car bombing last Monday. – Sapa-AFP