A major assault by United States forces to wrest control of the rebel-held town of Falluja loomed closer on Sunday after Iraq’s interim Prime Minister, Ayad Allawi, warned that his ”patience was running thin” with talks to find a peaceful solution.
The interim government has repeatedly demanded that Falluja leaders halt insurgent activity, hand over foreign Islamist militants loyal to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and accept the return of Iraqi security forces.
”If there is a failure in doing this peacefully, then we will do it by force,” Allawi told a news conference in Baghdad.
The rising pressure on the rebel stronghold came as violence in Iraq continued. On Sunday night, a rocket hit the Sunubar Hotel in Tikrit, killing 15 Iraqis and wounding eight others, hospital officials said.
In Baghdad on Saturday, a car bomb exploded outside the office of the Al Arabiya television network, killing seven people and injuring 19, while eight marines were killed and 10 wounded when a car bomb detonated next to a truck west of Baghdad — the biggest number of American military deaths in a single incident since May.
British soldiers also came under attack. Four shells landed early on Sunday in the Black Watch battle group’s desolate new base, Camp Dogwood, south of Falluja. In the southern city of Basra, two rockets exploded near where the British contingent has its headquarters.
There was also grim news on the hostage front, with the discovery of the decapitated body of a 24-year-old Japanese hostage, Shosei Koda, found in Baghdad wrapped in an American flag. He was kidnapped last week by a group led by Zarqawi. The body of another hostage, the Iraqi Kurdish journalist Nasrallah al-Dawoodi, was also found on Sunday, police said.
Allawi gave no deadline for the government’s demands over Falluja but said: ”We have to restore stability in Iraq … The window for such a peaceful settlement is closing.”
US officials have said the decision to attack Falluja rests with the Iraqi prime minister.
In the nearby town of Ramadi, six people were killed on Sunday in clashes between US forces and rebels.
Regaining control over Falluja and Ramadi is a key part of the government’s strategy to restore control to more than 20 Sunni-dominated towns before the national election due in January which Allawi said on Sunday would happen on time.
US military commanders believe up to 5 000 Islamic militants, Saddam Hussein loyalists and criminal gangs operate from Falluja. For weeks, US forces have been attacking what they claim are insurgent strongholds in the city.
The city’s religious leaders — who have warned that any attack would spark an uprising in the Sunni triangle and a boycott of the elections by Sunni Muslims — insist that there are no foreign Arab fighters in the city and that Zarqawi is not there.
The Black Watch battle group in central Iraq has been charged with cutting off the supply lines for the Iraqi resistance in the city when the US attack comes. They will patrol villages on the west bank of the Euphrates and the adjacent deserts to prevent the movement of insurgents.
But they are being hampered by a dearth of intelligence about their new area of responsibility. ”We are working in an information vacuum to a degree,” one British officer told an embedded reporter. ”If it sounds vague, that’s because no one has the information, to be frank.”
The Japanese government vowed to keep its troops in Iraq despite the beheading of Koda. But his death could harden opinion against the deployment, due there until December 14. – Guardian Unlimited Â