Iraq: US-led troops battling to take control of Falluja ran into pockets of fierce resistance yesterday as aid agencies pressed for access to the Iraqi city to take food and water to civilians trapped inside.
Just hours after US marines said insurgents were penned into the south of Falluja, a battle erupted in the northwest of the city, a Reuters correspondent with marines in the area said.
US marine Lieut Gen Thomas Sattler said his forces now occupied about 80 per cent of Falluja, but that even within that area there was "clearing up" still to be done.
"Our goal right now, we feel we've broken their back and their spirit, is to keep the heat on them," Lieut Gen Sattler told reporters at a briefing at Camp Falluja, just outside the city.
The Iraqi Red Crescent Society urged US forces and the Iraqi government to let it deliver food, medicine and water, describing conditions in Falluja as a disaster.
Insurgents determined to show they are undeterred by the four-day-old offensive in Iraq's most rebellious city have hit back hard with attacks and bombings elsewhere, causing two days of bloody chaos in the northern city of Mosul.
US Capt Angela Bowman described Mosul as calmer overnight, with its three million residents under a dusk-to-dawn curfew. US aircraft staged air strikes on Mosul after dark on Thursday to try to restore order, bombing rebel positions.
The Iraqi government fired the city's police chief, sources said.
A resident of Mosul said while the situation seemed slightly calmer yesterday, there were no Iraqi security forces on the streets, and the air was heavy with tension. Capt Bowman said Iraqi national guard reinforcements were being sent to Mosul from a base near the Syrian border to help out.
Machine-gun fire and grenade blasts echoed across northern Baghdad's Sunni Adhamiya district yesterday as rebels fought national guards, witnesses said. The clashes subsided later.
A US soldier was killed in an ambush in a southern Baghdad neighbourhood, and a US Black Hawk helicopter was brought down by ground fire northeast of Baghdad, injuring three of the four-man crew, the US military said.
In Falluja, the US military acknowledges that insurgent leaders and foreign militants may have fled before the attack began on Monday night, but says those who remain are bottled up.
"They can't go north because that's where we are. They can't go west because of the Euphrates river and they can't go east because we have a huge presence there. So they are cornered in the south," marine Master Sgt Roy Meek told Reuters.
Hours after he spoke, fighting broke out in the Jolan district in the northwest of the city.
A huge explosion shook Jolan later, but its cause was not clear.
Tank crews said they had driven rebels through a "ghost town" to a southern area the Americans say is a stronghold for foreign militants led by al-Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
An audio tape from Zarqawi, posted on a Web site used by Islamists, urged insurgents in Falluja to resist the US-led attacks, saying victory was certain.
"We have no doubt that the signs of God's victory will appear on the horizon," said the speaker who sounded like Zarqawi in the tape.
The US military says 22 US and five Iraqi troops have been killed and 170 American soldiers wounded in Falluja.Lieut Gen Sattler said his forces had taken 150 fighters into custody, of whom more than a dozen were foreigners. Of those foreign fighters he said 10 were Iranians.
About 300 people had negotiated their surrender at a mosque in Falluja, he said, and US forces were trying to determine who among them were fighters and who were non-combatants.
Rasoul Ibrahim, who fled Falluja on foot with his wife and three children on Thursday morning, said families left in the city were in desperate need. Doctors at Falluja's hospital said there had been an increase in typhoid cases. "There's no water. People are drinking dirty water.
Children are dying," Ibrahim told aid workers in Habbaniya, a makeshift refugee camp 20 km (12 miles) to the west of Falluja where some 2,000 families are sheltering. "People are eating flour because there's no proper food."
Violence in Falluja and elsewhere in Iraq has taken a toll on US forces. Two aircraft ferried 102 seriously wounded soldiers from Iraq to the main US military hospital in Germany on Thursday, joining 125 who arrived earlier in the week.
Ms Marie Shaw, spokeswoman at Landstuhl hospital, said 11 more soldiers wounded in combat were due to arrive yesterday.