ABU GHRAIB, Iraq — The confrontation between the United States and the insurgents holed up in Fallujah escalated yesterday as U.S. planes struck suspected guerrilla targets and U.S. troops warned residents over loudspeakers to turn in militants by nightfall.
Residents said smoke could be seen rising from the Shuhada area in the southeast of the rebel-held city about 40 miles west of Baghdad.
U.S. military vehicles cut off a northwestern entrance to the city and urged residents by loudspeaker to “hand over the terrorists, or the night is near,” witnesses said.
The U.S. military said Marines were fighting insurgents on the outskirts of the city for the second consecutive day after being targeted by small arms and mortar fire.
Continued U.S. attacks on the rebel held city west of Baghdad signaled a rejection of a call by city leaders a day earlier that all air strikes cease.
Even as city leaders made their demands at an extraordinary noontime gathering a day earlier at Fallujah City Hall explosions could be heard elsewhere in the city.
The city’s rebel leaders demanded U.S. air strikes be stopped; families be allowed to return to their homes; compensation be paid for property damaged in the bombing; and Iraqi forces patrolling the city be made up of residents of Fallujah and the surrounding Anbar province.
U.S. forces and the Iraqi government have vowed to pacify the violent city in time for elections scheduled in January.
This week, an influential group of Sunni Muslim clerics threatened to call for an election boycott if the U.S. military attempted to clear Fallujah.
“If the operations in Fallujah continue, we call on people not to participate in the elections and reject its results,” said Hareth al-Dari, leader of the Muslim Scholars Association, a hard-line clerical group that vocally supports the resistance.
U.S. and Iraqi forces yesterday arrested another leading member of the Islamist group, Sheikh Abdel-Sattar Abdel-Jabbar, along with his two sons and a neighbor in a raid on a Baghdad mosque.
Fighting in Fallujah last April killed dozens of Marines and left hundreds of residents dead before U.S. forces pulled back and allowed an Iraqi military unit staffed by Fallujans to take over.
Soon afterward, the city fell into the hands of insurgents, some of them from other Arab countries.
The Bush administration says the city has become a stronghold for followers of Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian Islamist whose group has taken responsibility for car bombings, kidnappings and hostage executions.
The U.S. military has subjected Fallujah to near daily bombing strikes on suspected Zarqawi safe houses, fighting positions and checkpoints.
“The recent strikes against the Zarqawi network have changed the leadership structure of the terrorist group, causing numerous reorganizations within the group,” the U.S. military said recently.
But some worry the heightened attacks might only disperse the fighters to other parts of Iraq, as well as cause more suffering and create more U.S. enemies.
“If a ground offensive on Fallujah took place, then thousands of people will be killed,” Brig. Gen. Sabah Naji al-Janabi, Fallujah’s chief of police told an Iraqi journalist.
“If the U.S. keeps insisting on the principle of the stick, there will be an inevitable war in Fallujah with regrettable consequences.”
In the town of Abu Ghraib, along the road to Fallujah, cars and buses full of Fallujans streamed unhindered toward Baghdad earlier this week.
“We don’t stop them,” said one police officer manning a checkpoint, refusing to give his name. “We don’t ask them where they’re going. We know they’re coming from Fallujah.”
In phone calls and conversations with Fallujans visiting the capital, residents described a ghost town, largely empty of all but resistance fighters and a few stragglers gathering up the last of their valuables.
During a hasty visit to Fallujah Thursday, an Iraqi translator working for a Western news organization encountered a frightened city. He said the only passengers on the minibus he rode into town were men wearing long beards of the type favored by adherents to the Wahhabi or Salafi Islam traditions associated with the resistance. Burned-out hulks of American tanks and supply trucks littered the road.
One resident still in Fallujah, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the city still had abundant food supplies, electricity and gasoline, but that up to 80 percent of the city of 200,000 had fled, fearing both the wrath of the Americans and the Islamist fighters, who have taken control of city streets.
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