BAGHDAD — A U.S. AC-130 gunship raked targets in Fallujah last night after hundreds of women and children fled the besieged city during a pause in the Marine offensive. On the anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, Baghdad and parts of central Iraq were chaotic.
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 that sent up a pall of black smoke. A Baghdad correspondent for Al Jazeera Arab television said at least nine persons were killed.
A second U.S. soldier was killed in an attack using roadside bombs and small arms on Camp Cooke, a U.S. base in northern Baghdad, the military said.
The military also announced the deaths of three Marines in the past 24 hours, bringing the toll of U.S. troops killed across Iraq this week to 45. The fighting has killed more than 460 Iraqis — including more than 280 in Fallujah, a hospital official said. At least 646 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq since the war began in March 2003.
Gunmen on the highway near Abu Ghraib just west of Baghdad were seen stopping a car carrying two Western civilians — apparently private security guards, because both had sidearms. The gunmen pulled the men from the car, firing at the ground to warn them to obey. Their fate was not known.
Insurgents in the area said they had seized four Italians and two Americans, Reuters news agency reported. In Washington the Pentagon would not go beyond confirmation that some in the area were unaccounted for.
A Reuters journalist saw two captive foreigners in a mosque in the district. One was wounded in the shoulder. Both men were weeping. They said they were Italian.
Italy’s Foreign Ministry said none of the Italian citizens known to be in Iraq was missing.
In Fallujah, Marines halted their assault on Sunni insurgents to allow U.S.-picked Iraqi leaders — angry at the United States over the bloodshed from five days of heavy fighting — to hold talks with city leaders about how to reduce the violence.
Throughout the afternoon, fighting was reduced to sporadic gunfire. But when night fell, heavy explosions resumed as an AC-130 gunship strafed targets, and soldiers and insurgents engaged in a mortar battle.
Iraq’s top U.S. administrator, L. Paul Bremer, said the unilateral pause was also aimed at allowing humanitarian aid to enter the city and Fallujah residents to tend to their dead.
Many families, emerging from their homes for the first time in days, buried slain relatives in the city football stadium.
A stream of hundreds of cars carrying women, children and elderly headed out of the city after Marines announced they would be allowed to leave. Families pleaded to be allowed to take out men, and when Marines refused, some entire families turned back.
The heavy fighting in Fallujah — during which mosques have been damaged and buildings demolished — has made the city of 200,000 a symbol of resistance for some Iraqis and threatens to divide the Iraqi Governing Council and the U.S. administration that appointed it.
Marines agreed only grudgingly to a halt in fighting. After initially being ordered to cease all offensive operations, they quickly demanded and received permission to launch assaults to prevent attacks if needed.
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the coalition’s deputy director of operations in Iraq, underlined that talks between two Governing Council members and sheiks and clerics representing Fallujah representatives were not negotiations, suggesting the military would not be making concessions. U.S. officials were not participating in the talks, which began yesterday.
For the first time, U.S. troops moved in strength into the heartland of the rebellion by the militia of Shi’ite cleric Sheik Muqtada al-Sadr. More than 1,000 troops backed by tanks pushed into the southern city of Kut, retaking police stations and government buildings seized this week by Shi’ite gunmen who forced Ukrainian troops to abandon the city.
A U.S. helicopter struck Sheik al-Sadr’s main office in Kut, killing two persons, witnesses said. Gen. Kimmitt said he expected the operation to retake Kut would be finished by this morning.
Still, he suggested a move against Sheik al-Sadr’s militia controlling parts of Najaf and Karbala would have to wait, because hundreds of thousands of Shi’ite pilgrims are in the area this weekend for al-Arbaeen, which commemorates the end of the period of mourning for a 7th-century martyred saint.
Elsewhere, fighting with Sheik al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia diminished. Coalition forces largely left gunmen in firm control in three cities of south-central Iraq, and further south, coalition troops have largely succeeded in taming the uprising, though Italian troops still experienced light fighting in the city of Nasiriyah.
Abdul-Karim Mahoud al-Mohammedawi, a Shi’ite on the Governing Council, announced he was suspending his council seat until “the bleeding stops in all Iraq.” He also met yesterday with Sheik al-Sadr, whom U.S. commanders have vowed to capture.
A Sunni council member, Ghazi al-Yawer, said he would quit if the Fallujah talks fell through.
One of the strongest pro-U.S. voices on the council, Adnan Pachachi, also a Sunni, denounced the U.S. siege. “It was not right to punish all the people of Fallujah, and we consider these operations by the Americans unacceptable and illegal,” Mr. Pachachi told Al Arabiya TV.
Meanwhile, in a signal of how U.S. forces face a new enemy in Iraq, two pictures of Sheik al-Sadr hung from a sculpture in Baghdad’s central Firdous Square, where one year ago Marines toppled a statue of Saddam.
A U.S. soldier climbed a ladder to tear down the posters, and the military warned that Sheik al-Sadr’s followers were planning bomb attacks in the area. Hours later, a mortar hit nearby, shaking two hotels where foreign journalists and contractors are staying.
Sheik al-Sadr yesterday demanded that U.S. forces leave Iraq, saying they now face “a civil revolt.”
“I direct my speech to my enemy, Bush, and I tell him … you are fighting the entire Iraqi people,” Sheik al-Sadr said in a sermon, delivered by one of his deputies at the Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf, Shi’ite Islam’s holiest site.
Sheik al-Sadr, a young, firebrand anti-U.S. cleric, is thought to be holed up in his office in Najaf, protected by scores of gunmen. He has said he is willing to die resisting any American attempt to capture him.
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