United States forces on Sunday continued their ferocious assault on Falluja in a military offensive apparently designed to bring the city back under the control of Iraq’s pro-US government.
Fierce clashes broke out between US troops and insurgents on a highway east of Falluja, witnesses said, and in the southern part of the city. The road to Baghdad had been blocked, witnesses added.
A car bomb exploded late on Sunday night near a cafe in Baghdad’s fashionable Jadiriya district. Al-Arabiya television said seven people were killed and about 20 injured.
Residents earlier reported new US air and artillery attacks as explosions boomed across the city. Plumes of smoke were seen rising from the eastern suburb of Askari and the southern area of Shuhada as families began to flee the area, residents said.
A burning Humvee was seen on Falluja’s eastern edge, they added. By sunset, US troops had pulled back, setting up a checkpoint south-west of the city, witnesses said.
Two Americans were killed on Saturday when a pair of helicopters crashed south of Baghdad, and four US soldiers died in car bomb blasts in northern Iraq and near the Syrian border on Friday.
Ayad Allawi, Iraq’s pro-US interim prime minister, demanded that residents in Falluja hand over the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. On Sunday Falluja clerics said they were willing to negotiate, but this was impossible while US planes were pulverising the city. ”We are still ready to go back to the talks and open new channels of dialogue,” the negotiator Abdul Hamid Jadou said.
Iraq’s US-appointed rulers seem determined to recapture Falluja, which has been under the control of insurgents since April. Sunday’s US assault appears to be part of a broader strategy to try to regain control of Iraq’s rebellious Sunni heartland in advance of elections scheduled for January. The US military, meanwhile, claims that foreign terrorists led by Zarqawi have taken over Falluja, and use it as a base to attack American troops.
In the US’s last major offensive, in April, as many as 500 civilians died, a significant number of them children. On Saturday hospital officials said that US artillery shells hit a house in Halabsa village, 16km south-west of Falluja, killing a three-year-old girl and injuring four family members, three of them children.
Over the weekend US jets attacked a checkpoint in the town apparently operated by Tawhid and Jihad, the brutal insurgent group led by Zarqawi and responsible for the execution of Ken Bigley and other western hostages. Three people were killed in the strike, Falluja’s hospital said.
In a separate development, Zarqawi’s group said in an internet statement that it would take orders from Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda from now on.
Britain’s ambassador to Iraq, Ed Chaplin, on Sunday appealed to Iraqis to help find the body of Bigley, who was beheaded by his kidnappers.
On Saturday, meanwhile, five churches in Baghdad were firebombed, in what appears to have been the latest attempt to sow sectarian unrest between Iraq’s different religious communities. Nobody was hurt.
Three people were killed on Sunday when a mortar was fired in Baghdad’s Sadr City at a collection point for Shia fighters to give up their weapons. The US military had extended a deadline from Friday to yesterday for militiamen loyal to the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to trade their weapons for money. – Guardian Unlimited Â