The council doesn't like the way we are taking down Falluajh. Tough toenails.
Civilians fleeing Fallujah
Battle rages on anniversary of Saddam's fall
Wire services
Apr. 10, 2004 12:00 AM
FALLUJAH, Iraq - Thousands of women and children fled this war-ravaged city Friday during a pause in the Marine offensive as the U.S.-led coalition sought to regain large swaths of the country that had fallen under the control of anti-American militias.
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On the anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, the United States also faced a revolt from its handpicked Governing Council.
Iraqi insurgents said they had taken six more hostages Friday, two Americans and four Italians, a day after militants showed footage of three captured Japanese aid workers whom they threatened to burn unless their country withdrew their troops from Iraq.
U.S. officials Friday declined to respond to reports that Americans were now in the hands of insurgents.
One Marine was killed in Fallujah and another was wounded in exchanges of fire after U.S. forces called a halt to offensive operations in the city, a spokesman said. Iraqis took advantage of a lull in the fighting to bury dozens of their dead in makeshift graves in the city's soccer stadium.
But when night fell, explosions resumed as an AC-130 gunship strafed targets and as soldiers and insurgents engaged in a mortar battle.
The AC-130 hit a cave near Fallujah where insurgents took refuge after an attack on Marines. A 500-pound laser-guided bomb also struck the cave, 1st Lt. Eric Knapp said.
The U.S. death in Fallujah, along with those of three Marines a day earlier announced Friday, brought the toll of U.S. troops killed across Iraq this week to 46. The fighting has killed more than 460 Iraqis, including more than 280 in Fallujah, a hospital official said. At least 647 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq since the war began in March 2003.
It was the deadliest week for the U.S.-led occupation since Saddam's ouster.
Elsewhere, U.S. troops drove into Kut before dawn Friday, pushing out members of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia that seized the southern city this week after Ukrainian troops abandoned the city under heavy attack.
A U.S. helicopter struck Sadr's main office in Kut, killing two people, witnesses said.
In Baghdad, gunmen running rampant on Baghdad's western edge attacked a fuel convoy, killing a U.S. soldier and an Iraqi driver and causing a fiery explosion. Two American soldiers and an unknown number of civilians were missing after the attack, and 12 people were injured, Pentagon officials said. A Baghdad correspondent for Al-Jazeera Arab television said at least nine people were killed.
Another U.S. soldier was killed in an attack on a base elsewhere in the capital, and large groups of insurgents battled U.S. troops in Baqouba and Muqdadiyah.
A week of intense fighting between coalition troops and a variety of Sunni and Shiite militias triggered concern that the coalition had lost control.
"The lid of the pressure cooker has come off," British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told BBC Radio. "There is no doubt that the . . . situation is very serious, and it is the most serious that we have faced.
"It is plainly the fact today that there are larger numbers of people, and they are people on the ground, Iraqis, not foreign fighters, who are engaged in this insurgency."
Despite the widespread revolt, U.S. authorities here sought to cast the turmoil in the best light.
"It's a gross mischaracterization to say the entire country is at war," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said Friday. "The entire country is under combat."
Much of Friday's hostilities occurred in Fallujah, where a noon cease-fire offered some hope that residents of the Sunni Triangle city would get some reprieve from five days of heavy combat.
U.S. authorities said most of the casualties were insurgents. Residents here said the dead included many civilians.
U.S. civilian Administrator L. Paul Bremer announced the cease-fire at noon so residents could retrieve their dead and collect food and medicine. U.S. commanders were also to have met with insurgent leaders.
Thousands of Iraqis made a wild rush out of the city with their belongings loaded in battered vehicles. The line of traffic stretched for miles. Marine Col. Don Toolan put the number of residents who left Fallujah at "easily 60,000."
Marines stopped and searched cars. Women and children were allowed to leave. Men of military age were turned back.
If there was rejoicing over the cease-fire Friday, it was brief. Within 90 minutes, the gunbattles resumed. "It is only 300,000 people living here, a small city, but the way the Americans are fighting, it's as if they are fighting a whole continent," resident Saad Farhan said. "This is the reconstruction and the freedom Bush is talking about? We prefer Saddam's repression."
Protests describing the U.S. offensive as an unwarranted punishment for the 200,000 people of Fallujah came from several members of the Iraqi Governing Council, the 25-member advisory body the Americans see as the nucleus of a provisional government after sovereignty is returned to Iraq on June 30. |
