US advances against Iraq militia

BAGHDAD -- American troops briefly suspended their assault on the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah yesterday to allow political negotiations over the fate of the besieged city, but fierce fighting later resumed, and the reported Iraqi death toll in the battle there rose to 450.

Residents who could not reach a cemetery because of the fighting buried their dead in the soccer stadium.US forces also moved against the Mahdi Army, the militia controlled by Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, elsewhere in Iraq, reclaiming control over most of the southern city of Kut and destroying Sadr's office there. US authorities said they would regain complete control of the city by today.

Military advances by the US-led coalition coincided with increasingly angry criticism from Iraqi politicians and religious leaders, just as the country's Shi'ite majority began observing its holiest holiday with a two-day pilgrimage that has already drawn 1 million people to the violence-marred city of Karbala.

The Fallujah fighting entered its fourth day and overshadowed all else in Iraq on the one-year anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein's government and the arrival of US troops in Baghdad.

Several members of the US-appointed Governing Council denounced the clashes in Fallujah and criticized the Marines' strategy of blockading all young men inside the Sunni-dominated city, which is 30 miles west of Baghdad. Sunnis and Shi'ites, in an unusual show of unity, prayed together, organized relief convoys for Fallujah, and pledged to support the rebellion there.

Insurgents said they had taken more foreign hostages, Reuters reported, including four Italians and two Americans. There was no word on their identities.

"We're not facing a new war," a US military spokesman, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, said.

But Britain's foreign secretary, Jack Straw, told BBC radio: "The lid of the pressure cooker has come off."

A delegation from the Governing Council traveled to Fallujah for talks that, according to Marine commanders, produced no results.

"There are no negotiations," coalition spokesman Dan Senor said. He also said that the suspension of "offensive operations" -- something less than a cease-fire -- came at the request of Iraqi officials who wanted to "address ways in which bloodshed could be minimized" and allow Fallujah residents to receive relief supplies and tend to their dead and wounded. But the respite proved to be brief. The Associated Press reported that a US AC-130 gunship fired on targets in Fallujah last night.

A year after Marines first rolled into Firdos Square in central Baghdad and pulled down the statue of Hussein, a wartime atmosphere prevailed in the Iraqi capital. Soldiers imposed a curfew in the square, tore down a portrait of Sadr from the pedestal of the same statue, and circled in a Humvee blaring warnings and loud rock music.

"Our assessment is that the offensive operations are going well," Kimmitt said. About 1,000 US soldiers moved from the capital to Kut, which Ukrainian troops had abandoned Wednesday.

The US Air Force bombed Sadr's headquarters in the city, and soldiers seized the occupation authority's headquarters and the three main bridges, which had been in the hands of Mahdi Army fighters.

"When coalition forces come in and attack, the Sadr forces shoot and scoot," Kimmitt said, adding that the Mahdi fighters appear to have won little popular support in Kut despite their tactical success.

Just outside the capital on the road toward Fallujah, one US soldier and one Iraqi were killed in an attack on a convoy that left a burning fuel truck spewing smoke, the US military reported. Local news reports, however, said at least nine bodies were visible at the scene of that attack. Rebels were in control of major stretches of highway immediately on Baghdad's western outskirts.

In Fallujah, carloads of women, children, and elderly poured out of the city during the suspension of hostilities. The US resumed airstrikes on Fallujah after dark, according to news service reports, signaling a return to the intense fighting of previous days, when Marines engaged in bruising firefights outside a mosque complex.

The US assault there began Tuesday, in response to the killing and mutilation in the city last week of four American civilians working as private security contractors. More than 450 Iraqis have been killed in the fighting there this week, a Fallujah hospital director told Reuters.

Hospital officials had put the death toll there at 280 a day earlier. Fallujah was inaccessible because of the combat and there was no independent confirmation of the casualty toll.

"America came. It claimed liberty and humanity. But it has killed so many Iraqis just because four people were killed," Waqas Nadhim, 21, a Sunni who took part in a joint prayer in Baghdad yesterday for all insurgents in Iraq. "It wants to restart the massacres all over again. If they feel humanity deserves so much respect, then why is their humanity respected and not ours?"

Kimmitt bristled at allegations by some Iraqi leaders that the US campaign in Fallujah amounted to "collective punishment."

"Those citizens in Fallujah who are just trying to live their life . . . have absolutely nothing to fear from the coalition," he said. "The operations are not punitive. The operations are extremely precise."

In Ramadi, where 12 US Marines were killed in an insurgent attack this week, a local sheik identified 11 "belligerents" and American troops were able to capture them all, Kimmitt said.

In the south, more than a million Shi'ite pilgrims were in the holy city of Karbala observing the Arba'in holiday. Five Iranian pilgrims were killed at a Polish checkpoint, Al-Jazeera television reported, and security around the city, mostly organized by another Shi'ite militia, the Badr Brigade, was tight.

Sadr's fighters remained in control of Kufa and central Najaf.

"I direct my speech to my enemy Bush and I tell him that if your excuse was that you are fighting Saddam, then this thing is past and now you are fighting the entire Iraqi people," Sadr said in a sermon delivered by a deputy in Najaf.

The BBC reported that Iyad Allawi, head of the Iraqi National Accord, resigned from the Governing Council, and the interim human rights minister, Abdel Basit Turki, also quit. Neither gave a reason for their decision.

Allawi had strongly condemned the wave of violence that began on Sunday, telling the Globe on Tuesday that "we cannot revert to violence and bloodletting."

Thanassis Cambanis can be reached at tcambanis@globe.com.