American mortars have pummelled parts of Falluja as troops hunted for guerrillas still fighting in the Iraqi city after nine days of bombardment. U.S. officers said Marines were "cleaning up" fragments of an insurgent force of Iraqi and foreign Islamists and Saddam Hussein loyalists that Iraq's interim government says has left some 1,600 rebels dead in the rubble of the urban battlefield. But elsewhere in the northern heartlands of the formerly dominant Sunni Muslim minority, trouble flared again as it has done repeatedly since U.S. and Iraqi troops launched a major offensive more than a week ago in Falluja, west of Baghdad. Five Iraqis were killed when a car bomb went off close to a U.S. patrol in the northern oil refining town of Baiji. But Mosul, Iraq's third biggest city, was relatively quiet after a week of clashes between guerrillas and U.S. and Iraqi allies. Two Turkish truck drivers were killed and their vehicles destroyed in a rocket attack on a civilian convoy near Samarra.
It is not clear how widely coordinated insurgent activity is, however, and so hard to assess whether violence in other Sunni towns has been led by figures formerly based in Falluja or simply a reaction to events there by sympathisers. More widely, the bloodshed in Falluja, including the alleged shooting dead of an unarmed and wounded guerrilla in a mosque by a U.S. Marine has provoked dismay among many in Iraq and the Arab world, where U.S. President George W. Bush has hoped the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would foster stability. |