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Over 500 insurgents killed in Fallujah: US

Baghdad bombs kill 22, two helicopters shot down

AFP, Reuters, Washington
The US military estimates that more than 500 insurgents have been killed in the battle for Fallujah while 22 people were killed in twin suicide bombings in Baghdad, a senior US defense official said yesterday.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that despite lighter-than-expected resistance, Marines have engaged in fierce fights in the city that have left many insurgents dead.
Asked how many insurgents have been killed in the battle for Fallujah, the official told AFI? "More than 500.”
General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked earlier in an interview on ABC television about reports that the city was a ghost town and whether the insurgents had moved out of Fallujah.
"It has been some hard fighting. And there have been a lot of insurgents — many, many, insurgents,
hundreds and hundred of insurgents who have either been killed or captured in this activity so far," Myers said.
US troops hunted rebels in the battered Iraqi city of Falluja yesterday, but rebels hit back with an armed rampage in Mosul and a powerful car bomb that killed 17 people in a crowded Baghdad street while another blast killed five people on late Wednesday night
The late morning car bomb in the heart of the Iraqi capital also wounded at least 20, a police source said.
A Reuters reporter saw four bodies in burned-out cars after the blast near a police patrol in a busy street just off Nasr Square. The bomb devastated a nearby building and littered the street with twisted metal and glass from shattered shop windows.
Earlier at least five people were killed and 20 wounded when a car bomb exploded near a police checkpoint in an eastern district of the Iraqi capital late Wednesday, a police chief said.
The attack took place in the Zayyuna district at about 7:00 pm (1600 GMT), the officer said.
Doctors at the nearby Kindi hospital said they received four dead and 21 wounded of whom one died later.
The Falluja assault has provoked an upsurge in violence elsewhere in Iraq, as happened in April during an earlier failed US attempt to subdue the country’s most rebellious ci ty.
Marines fired mortar barrages against elusive guerrillas in Falluja's Jolan district as tanks squeezed down alleys to eliminate resistance on the third full day of the offensive.
Impacts from relentless mortar blasts and sporadic artillery fire blanketed parts of the city with black smoke as rebels responded with occasional mortar rounds and sniper fire.
US officers said Marine Corps and army units had gained a large presence throughout Falluja but were still taking some fire from Saddam Hussein loyalists and foreign militants.
Tanks punched through Jolan to the Euphrates river and were chasing down remaining rebels to consolidate control over the city 32 miles west of Baghdad.
"Things are going, I think, as planned. We've got about 70 percent of the city under control," US General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told CBS television.
"There have been hundreds and hundreds of insurgents who have been either killed or captured." he said.
But while US-led troops fought for the upper hand in Falluja, insurgents in the northern city of Mosul set police stations ablaze, stole weapons and roamed the streets.
Residents said Iraq's third largest city seemed to slide out of control as grenade blasts and gunfire rang through empty streets and smoke billowed from two burning police stations.
Rebels attacked Iraqi national guards controlling a bridge in die city center, killing five of them, witnesses said.
A cameraman for Reuters filmed gunmen raiding weapons and ilak jackets from a police station before setting it on fire.
"It’s crazy, really, really crazy," said Abdallah Fathi, a resident who witnessed the police station attack.
A photographer working for Reuters was snot in the leg and taken to hospital. Doctors said one civilian had been killed and at least 25 wounded in the past two days of fighting.
Violence has worsened in Mosul, a strongly nationalist city of three million people, over the past year, but residents said the chaos of the past two days had broken new ground.
"Yesterday, the city felt like hell, today it could be the same or worse," Fathi said.
Apparently responding to the Falluja offensive, insurgents have staged attacks this week in die 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.
Kirkuk's provincial governor escaped unhurt when a car bomb blew up near his convoy in the northern city, wounding 16 people, police and hospital officials said.
In Falluja, residents said the stench of decomposing bodies hung over the battered city, power and water supplies had been cut for five days and food was running out for thousands of civilians trapped in their homes by the fighting.
Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, who ordered the assault, has come under personal pressure from Islamist militants who kidnapped three of his relatives onTbesday.
The militants have threatened to behead Allawi's 75-year-old cousin Ghazi and two women relatives unless he calls off the assault. The government has said its policy will not change.
The Iraqi military governor in Falluja said his men had found "slaughterhouses" where militants had held and killed hostages, along with records of victims.
But Major-General Abdul-Qader Jassim told reporters he could not say if the evidence offered any clues to the fate of at least nine foreign hostages still missing.
Allawi and his US backers have vowed to pacify Falluja and the rest of the country before elections due in January.