Clashes erupt in Baghdad, US offers Falluja truce

5.00am

BAGHDAD - Street fighting erupted in Baghdad on Saturday as youths with rifles and grenade launchers battled US troops in a Sunni Muslim area, witnesses said.

Dozens of gunmen, faces masked by Arab headdresses, attacked a police station and shot at US troops from alleyways in northwest Baghdad's Adhimiya district. Reuters journalists saw an Iraqi shot dead in his car as he tried to flee the area.

As violence struck the capital, the US military offered a new cease-fire deal in the Sunni town of Falluja where a week of fighting has killed hundreds of people.

"Coalition forces are prepared to implement a cease-fire with enemy elements in Falluja commencing at noon today," Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt told a news conference.

"At this point it's an aspiration. We are hoping to use this press conference...to get this message to the enemy."

The US truce offer came after Iraqi politicians, decrying "collective punishment" meted out to people in Falluja demanded a halt to the worst fighting since Saddam Hussein fell.

The aim was to allow peace talks between Iraqi officials and insurgents, with no US participation, Kimmitt said.

US forces said on Friday they were suspending offensive operations in Falluja, west of Baghdad, but the unilateral move failed to halt fighting. More clashes erupted there on Saturday.

Four Americans were killed and their bodies publicly mutilated in Falluja 10 days ago, prompting US retaliation.

In other new attacks, a US tank was set on fire on a highway west of Baghdad. Locals told a Reuters photographer that the M1A1 Abrams main battle tank was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade fired from a bridge by a 10-year-old boy.

A truck hit by a roadside bomb aimed at a US convoy, blazed on the road to Baghdad airport, a major military base.

BERLUSCONI IN IRAQ

With leaders of US allies, including Japan, Britain and Italy, under domestic political pressure over deaths and real or rumored kidnappings of their citizens in Iraq, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi paid an Easter visit to his troops.

Global controversy over the invasion continues a year on but Berlusconi vowed this week to stay the course alongside President Bush: "It is unthinkable to flee the mission we have started. We would leave the country in chaos," he said.

The US-installed Iraqi Governing Council issued a statement criticizing "military solutions and the policy of collective punishment that has fallen on innocent civilians."

The 25-member body picked by US administrator Paul Bremer demanded "an immediate cease-fire and the reliance on political solutions in all areas of the country, especially Falluja."

The violence has put severe pressure on the council and on the interim Iraqi government, with several members resigning or threatening to do so unless the bloodshed stops.

The director of Falluja's main hospital said on Friday about 450 people had been killed and 1,000 wounded since the Marines launched "Operation Vigilant Resolve" five days earlier.

Battles in Falluja and elsewhere in the Sunni heartlands of central Iraq have coincided with an uprising led by radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr across the south.

Hospital officials in the mixed Sunni-Shi'ite town of Baquba, north of Baghdad, said Friday's fighting with US troops there had killed nine people and wounded 35.

US forces attacked Sadr's office in Baquba overnight, damaging it and wrecking a building next door, witnesses said.

MILLION PILGRIMS

About a million Shi'ites were set to mark the holy day of Arbain in the shrine city of Kerbala on Saturday, prompting fears among US officials of more chaos and bloodshed. The US administration has said it cannot guarantee pilgrims' safety.

Arbain, beginning on Saturday night and continuing through Sunday, comes 40 days after the religious period of Ashura, when suicide bombers in Baghdad and Kerbala killed 171 people.

Sheikh Hamza al-Tai, a leader of Sadr's Mehdi Army, said it had suspended "liberation operations" in Kerbala until after the ceremonies, according to a tape aired by Al Jazeera television.

US officials say they fear a repeat of the March bombings, which Washington says were masterminded by a Jordanian with links to the al Qaeda network to try to spark civil war in Iraq.

A spate of kidnapping has fueled turmoil in Iraq, where three Japanese and several other foreigners are held hostage.

The Pentagon said two US soldiers and an unknown number of civilian contractors were missing after an attack on a military fuel convoy in Abu Ghraib, just west of Baghdad on Friday.

A Reuters journalist saw two captive foreigners, one of them wounded, in a mosque at Abu Ghraib. Gunmen holding them said they were Italian.

In Tokyo, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi stood firm against protesters demanding he pull Japanese troops out to save three civilian hostages. Kidnappers are threatening to burn them alive if Japanese troops are still in Iraq on Sunday.

Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Friday he had been surprised by the strength of the Sunni and Shi'ite rebels, saying there were signs of tactical contact between them.

"It's been a tough week, let's be clear about that. But I still believe that most Iraqis are with us," he told Fox News.

At least 51 US and allied soldiers have been killed in the past week. Some foreign civilians have also died.

Since the start of the US-led war at least 455 US troops have been killed in action in Iraq, according to the Pentagon.

- REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq