US troops today vowed to use overwhelming force to enter the volatile Iraqi town of Falluja and hunt down those who killed and mutilated four American contractors.
Marines took up positions on the outskirts of the town west of Baghdad where insurgents ambushed the contractors yesterday, but the US army's deputy director of operations Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said they would return.
Falluja shop worker Amir
"Coalition forces will respond," Gen Kimmitt told a news conference. "They are coming back and they are going to hunt down the people responsible for this bestial act.
"It will be at a time and a place of our choosing. It will be methodical, it will be precise and it will be overwhelming."
Television footage of jubilant Iraqis mutilating the bodies recalled events in Mogadishu in 1993, when a crowd dragged the bodies of American soldiers through the streets, hastening the departure of US forces from Somalia.
Falluja was relatively quiet today, but residents said more bloody killings should be expected.
"The Americans may think it is unusual but this is what they should expect. They show up in places and shoot civilians so why can't they be killed?" Falluja shop worker Amir said.
US troops fired on demonstrators in Falluja last April, killing at least 15 people. Many residents then vowed revenge. Guerrillas near the town detonated a roadside bomb as a US convoy passed by, wounding three soldiers. One Humvee left behind by American soldiers near the site of the attack was later set ablaze and looted by a crowd of Iraqis.
A roadside bomb killed five US soldiers on yesterday in the same area, a hotspot for resistance to the occupation.
The USgovernor of Iraq Paul Bremer vowed to hunt down those responsible for ambushing the contractors, and those who then torched the corpses and dragged them through the streets before hanging them from a bridge.
As the Falluja violence sparked renewed concern among foreign organisations working in Iraq, a high-profile US-sponsored trade fair for companies rebuilding Iraq was postponed.