Fallujah rebels 'fighting to the death'

At least five suicide bombers targeted American troops elsewhere in volatile Sunni Muslim areas north and west of the capital, injurin at least nine Americans.

Three of the suicide attacks occurred simultaneously in three locations between Fallujah and the insurgent stronghold of Ramadi, the US command said.

In a speech found on the internet today, a speaker said to be Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the country’s most feared terror leader, called on his followers to “shower” the Americans “with rockets and mortars” because US forces were spread too thin as they seek to finish off Islam in Fallujah”.

The worst reported fighting took place about 35 miles northeast of Baghdad following assaults on police stations in Baqouba and its twin city Buhriz.

Gunmen abducted police Col Qassim Mohammed, took him to the Buhriz police station and threatened to kill him if police didn’t surrender the station. When police refused, the gunmen tied the colonel’s hands behind his back and shot him dead.

US and Iraqi troops rushed to the scene, setting off a gunbattle that killed 26 insurgents and five other Iraqi police, Iraqi officials said.

At the same time, insurgents attacked a police station in Baqouba and seized another building. US aircraft dropped two 500lb bombs before the end of the fighting, in which four American soldiers were wounded, the US command said.

During the fighting, US troops came under fire from a mosque.

Iraqi security stormed the mosque and found rocket-propelled grenades, mortar rounds and other weapons and ammunition, the statement said.

Three suicide car bombings targeted US forces in the insurgent zone between Fallujah and Ramadi, the US military said.

In one, the bomber rammed into a Marine armoured vehicle, wounding the four troops inside.

The two other bombings caused no injuries – including one in which the driver rammed his car into a tank but his explosives failed to explode.

Witnesses reported a fourth car bombing tonight in Ramadi against a US convoy but there was no report of casualties.

In Mosul, where an uprising broke out last week in support of the Fallujah defenders, a suicide driver tried to ram his bomb-laden vehicle into a US convoy, the military said. He missed but set off the explosives, wounding five soldiers, four of them slightly.

Four American soldiers were wounded when their patrol ran over a land mine near Beiji in northern Iraq, the military said.

During a press conference in Baghdad, Interior Minister Falah Hassan al-Naqib, himself a Sunni Muslim, condemned the growing attacks on Iraqi police and security forces, calling them part of a campaign “to divide this country and thrust it into a civil war.”

“They are trying by all means to divide this country and to create an ethnic and sectarian war,” al-Naqib said of the insurgents.

Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said police had arrested the leader of a militant group behind the killig of some foreign hostages.

Moayad Ahmed Yasseen, leader of the group Muhammad’s Army, was captured along with some of his followers, Allawi said. He did not say what kidnappings the group has been involved in.

However, a statement by the prime minister’s office later described Muhammad’s Army as the “armed wing of an organisation created by Saddam Hussein” to fight for the return of the Baath party to power.

The rise in violence accompanied the American-led assault against Fallujah, the main rebel stronghold. The week-old offensive in Fallujah has left at least 38 American troops and six Iraqi soldiers dead.

The number of US troops wounded is now 320, though 134 have returned to duty. US officials estimated more than 1,200 insurgents have been killed.

In an interview with reporters at the Pentagon, Marine Col. Michael Regner, operations officer for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said US and Iraqi forces had captured more than 1,052 prisoners in Fallujah, most of them are Iraqis but some foreigners.

“Very few of them are giving up,” Regner said. “They’re fighting to the death.”