IRAQ: US troops fought yesterday to crush resistance in the Iraqi city of Falluja, but rebels hit back with an armed rampage in Mosul and a car bomb which killed 17 people in a crowded Baghdad street.
Marines met little opposition in the former insurgent stronghold of Jolan in north-west Falluja, where guerrillas fired only one or two mortar rounds as tanks pushed through alleys. But a huge explosion sent a fireball into the sky after dark.
US marines had to call in four air strikes after taking heavy fire at their headquarters in central Falluja. A BBC correspondent with the marines said a rifle company had come under continuous fire when it pushed out of the base into the city on a house-to-house search for insurgents.
Jolan, a stronghold for Saddam Hussein loyalists, had seen some of the fiercest fighting of this week's US-led offensive in the Sunni Muslim city, 50 km west of Baghdad.
Gen Richard Myers, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff,said: "Things are going, I think, as planned. We've got about 70 percent of the city under control."
Eighteen US and five Iraqi soldiers have died since the assault began on Monday and 69 US troops have been wounded, Falluja marine commander Maj Gen Richard Natonski said.
Planes ferried 178 seriously wounded soldiers from Iraq to the main US military hospital in Germany yesterday, joining 125 who arrived between Monday and Wednesday.
"This is one of our peak periods," a hospital spokeswoman said. "We are very busy, it is more than we have seen in the last couple of months because we used to admit about 30 patients a day."
The US had estimated that 600 rebels had died in the Falluja offensive so far, but the figure had not been confirmed, spokesman Lieut-Col Steve Boylan said in Baghdad.
Two US Cobra helicopters were shot down near Falluja yesterday, but the pilots and crew were unhurt. The assault has provoked an upsurge in violence elsewhere, as happened in April during an earlier failed US attempt to subdue Iraq's most rebellious city.
Yesterday's late morning car bomb which killed 17 people in central Baghdad also wounded at least 20, a police source said.
Apparently responding to the Falluja offensive, insurgents have also staged attacks this week in the Sunni towns and cities of Samarra, Baiji, Baquba, Tikrit, Ramadi and parts of Baghdad.
Six national guards were killed near Tikrit, Saddam's home town, by a roadside bomb on Wednesday night, witnesses said.
Falluja residents said the stench of decomposing bodies hung over the city, power and water supplies were cut and food was running out for thousands of trapped civilians. Iraqi aid groups yesterday delivered food and medicine to refugees sheltering in Habbaniya, west of Falluja, and they hoped to reach Falluja today for the first time.
About 10,000 US troops, backed by 2,000 Iraqi government troops, are engaged in the battle for Falluja.
Meanwhile the now-retired US general who led the 2003 invasion of Iraq said the US military would be involved in Iraq for another one to three years.
Gen Tommy Franks said when he launched the invasion last year, he expected US forces to be involved in Iraq for three to five years.
"Well, we're a couple of years into that," he said at a conference in Lisbon, "so . . . another one to three years, I think we'll be involved helping the Iraqis build their own capability."
Pentagon officials have declined to give a timetable for the length of the war or US military commitment in Iraq.
Gen Franks said the offensive to crush insurgents in the Iraqi city of Falluja was moving in the right direction. "Falluja won't be the end of the problem in Iraq, but it is the beginning of the end of the problem in Iraq," he said..