Marines secure part of Fallujah

FALLUJAH, Iraq — Marines battled Sunni insurgents door to door in Fallujah and Ramadi yesterday, securing one-quarter of Fallujah while risking Muslim anger by using a 500-pound bomb to cut off resistance from inside a mosque compound.

Polish, Ukrainian and other allied forces took the brunt of attacks by a Shi’ite militia in cities across southern Iraq. The uprising spread for the first time to a suburb of Kirkuk, north of Baghdad.

The U.S. military confirmed 12 Marines were killed Tuesday in Ramadi, where fighting continued yesterday along a mile-long front. Two Marines were killed yesterday in Fallujah and one the day before.

Overnight, four Iraqis were killed in a U.S. air raid on Baghdad’s Sadr City, a Shi’ite neighborhood. Three others died from wounds sustained in fighting a day earlier, a hospital director said yesterday.

In Washington, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said some troops scheduled to be rotated out of Iraq might have to remain in the country while the uprising is brought under control.

Munitions exploded at the rate of one or two a minute throughout the afternoon in Fallujah, the Sunni heartland city where four Americans were killed and their bodies mutilated last week.

“This has been going on for hours,” said Lance Cpl. Jamil Alkattan of South Bend, Ind., part of a unit guarding a cloverleaf intersection just outside the city. “This is the hot spot. We won’t let them escape. They have to stay and fight.”

Fighting persisted for six hours around the Abdul-Aziz al-Samarrai Mosque, which Marine commanders said began when a rocket-propelled grenade fired from the mosque compound hit a Marine vehicle, wounding five men.

Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne, commanding officer of the 1st Battalion, 5th Regiment, said his forces gradually escalated firepower, at one point shooting a Hellfire missile into the compound from a Cobra helicopter.

When the fighting continued, they called in an airstrike in which an F-16 fighter dropped a laser-guided bomb at the base of the mosque’s minaret. It left a huge crater but none of the buildings were seriously damaged.

The Associated Press quoted witnesses saying the mosque had been filled with worshippers, and as many as 40 persons were killed. The dead and injured were carried to nearby homes making any accurate casualty count impossible.

Col. Byrne said when Marines entered the compound about a half hour after the airstrike, it was empty but the floor was littered with shell casings.

Witnesses said members of the U.S.-trained Iraqi Civilian Defense Corps appeared to be helping supply fighters inside the mosque during the battle. A Pentagon official in Washington was unable to comment on the claim.

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman in Iraq, said in Baghdad that holy places are protected by the Geneva Conventions but that an attack is legal “when there is a military necessity brought on by the fact that the enemy is storing weapons, using weapons, inciting violence and executing violence from its grounds.”

It was the third day of round-the-clock fighting in Fallujah, a city of about 300,000. Col. Byrne, who described it as “classic old-fashioned urban zone warfare,” said about one-quarter of the city had been secured by nightfall with progress slowed by U.S. efforts to minimize civilian casualties.

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