Hundreds Dead In Fallujah
More than 600 Iraqis have been killed in fighting in Fallujah since Marines began a siege against Sunni insurgents in the city a week ago, the head of the city's hospital said Sunday.
More than 50 U.S. troops died in the last week in Iraq, including two shot down in their helicopter over Baghdad today.
The dead totaled more than 600 since the siege of Fallujah began early Monday, said the hospital's director Rafie al-Issawi. Bodies were being buried in two soccer fields, one of which was seen by an AP reporter with row after row of graves.
"We have reports of an unknown number of dead being buried in people's homes without coming to the clinics," al-Issawi said.
Asked about the report of 600 dead, Marine Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne said, "What I think you will find is 95 percent of those were military age males that were killed in the fighting."
"The Marines are trained to be precise in their fire power .... The fact that there are 600 goes back to the fact that the Marines are very good at what they do," he said.
A day earlier, Byrne, commander of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, said his batallion — one of three in or around the city — had confirmed 40 Iraqi insurgents were killed and 19 others were likely dead throughout the entire campaign.
President Bush, attending an Easter service at a chapel at Fort Hood, Texas, braced the country for the possibility of more American casualties in Iraq while saying the U.S.-led mission is just.
"It was a tough week last week and my prayers and thoughts are with those who pay the ultimate price for our security," the president said. "Our troops are taking care of business. Their job is to make Iraq more secure so that a peaceful Iraq can emerge."
Statistics of the dead were gathered from four main clinics around the city and and from Fallujah General Hospital, which have all been taking in bodies, said the hospital's director Rafie al-Issawi.
Bodies were being buried at the soccer fields in Fallujah as residents took advantage of a pause in fighting since Friday to tend to casualties.
At one of the fields, now called "Graveyard of the Martyrs," seen by an AP reporter and filmed by Associated Press Television News, there was row after row of freshly dug graves, with wooden planks for headstones with names on them.
Khalaf al-Jumaili, a volunteer with the bodies at "Graveyard of the Martyrs," said more than 300 people have been buried at the site.
Volunteers were seen carrying in bodies in blankets and lowering them into graves, while standers-by shouted, "Martyr, martyr."
It was not known how many were buried at the other football field.
Asked Sunday about the number of Iraqi casualties in Fallujah, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt referred reporters to Marine spokesmen. But he insisted that Marines are "tremendously precise" in their operations and suggested insurgents were hiding among civilians, causing any civilian deaths.
Nearly a third of Fallujah's 200,000 people also fled the city during the lull. During the past week's fighting, Marines and insurgents have battled in residential neighborhood, sometimes around mosques, with the Marines calling in tanks and helicopter gunships for support. AC-130 warplanes have also been used, and Marine snipers have taken up positions on buildings.
Marines say insurgents have used at least one mosque as a firebase to attack American troops. Witnesses in the city have reported Marine snipers firing from a separate mosque's minaret on insurgents below.
A battalion of the U.S.-created Iraqi army refused to go to Fallujah to support U.S. troops earlier this week, senior U.S. Army officers told the Washington Post. Theys said the incident marked the first time U.S. commanders asked the postwar Iraqi army to take part in major combat operations. Large numbers of Iraqi security forces have also stopped doing their jobs, the Post reports.
This past week has been the deadliest for U.S. troops since President Bush declared the end of major combat, reports CBS News Correspondent Martha Teichner. Kidnappings and battles to retake whole cities are signs that Sunnis and Shiites - sworn enemies - are joining forces to fight the U.S. occupation.
"What's happened in the past week is a qualitative change in the nature and the scale of the resistence we face," says Richard Betts, an expert in military strategy and terrorism from Columbia University. "Whether this massive resistance and the coordination between different Iraqi interest groups grows is the real question now. If it does, we're in very deep trouble."
Bush administration and U.S. military assessments of the danger in Iraq are consistently more optimistic than news reports, but thousands of U.S. soldiers set to rotate home from Iraq are likely to be held back, Teichner reports.
Smoke rose on Baghdad's western edge where the AH-64 Apache helicopter was downed by ground fire in the morning. More helicopters circled overhead, while U.S. troops closed off the main highway — a key supply route into the capital.
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt told a news briefing Sunday that the two-member crew was killed and a quick-reaction team was collecting the bodies.
Heavy firing was heard, and tanks and Humvees moved into the area near the suburb of Abu Ghraib, where masked gunmen have wreaked havoc for the past three days, attacking fuel convoys and blowing up tanker trucks. Insurgents kidnapped an American civilian and killed a U.S. soldier in the area Friday.
The captors of Thomas Hamill, a Mississippi native who works for a U.S. contractor in Iraq, threatened to kill and burn him unless U.S. troops end their assault on Fallujah, west of Baghdad, by 6 a.m. Sunday. The deadline passed with no word on Hamill's fate.
Video footage aired on Arabic television Sunday showed the bodies of two dead Westerners — possibly a pair of Americans seen by APTN cameramen on Friday being dragged out of a car on the Abu Ghraib highway, in a different incident from Hamill's kidnapping.
The video showed the bodies surrounded by gunmen, who say the two were American intelligence officers. One of the bodies lay sprawled on the pavement, his face bloodied and his right leg drenched in blood. The other body has his shirt lifted to reveal a bullet hole in his back. Both wore dark T-shirts and khaki pants often worn by private contractors.
Other insurgents who kidnapped two Japanese men and a woman said Saturday they would free their captives within 24 hours because of an appeal from Sunni clerics. But the two aid workers and a photojournalist had still not been released by Sunday evening, according to a Japanese Embassy official in Baghdad, Hiroyuki Oura.
Also Sunday, Germany's Foreign Ministry said two security agents for the German Embassy in Iraq are probably dead four days after their convoy was ambushed near Fallujah. And Britain's Foreign Office said Gary Teeley, a British man who had reportedly been kidnapped in the southern city of Nasiriyah, is safe and in the hands of coalition forces.
Fallujah — 35 miles west of Baghdad — saw occasional sniper fire Sunday, but was the quietest it has been all week. Sunni insurgents and Marines agreed to a cease-fire that started early Sunday and will last until the evening amid talks between Iraqi officials on how to end the violence.
More than 600 Iraqis have been killed in the fighting in Fallujah since fighting began early Monday, the head of the city's hospital said Sunday. Rafie al-Issawi said actual number may be higher because there were reports of people being buried at home.
At least five Marines have died in the fighting.
Members of the Iraqi Governing Council were holding a second day of negotiations with city representatives Sunday in an attempt to win the handover of Iraqis who killed and mutilated four American civilians on March 31 and of other militants.
Hundreds of U.S. reinforcements moved in place on the city edge, joining 1,200 Marines and nearly 900 Iraqi security forces already involved in the fighting.
The most serious break in Sunday's peace came when a sniper opened fire on U.S. patrol, wounding two Marines, commanders said. In the ensuing gunbattle, at least one insurgent was killed.
"They are not playing by the rules, sir," Marine Capt. Jason Smith radioed to his commander after taking fire in another incident in which the troops did not fire back.
Sunday was the first that gunmen have said they were joining the halt in offensive operations that Marines have largely stuck to unilaterally since noon Friday.
"At the moment we're just trying to get the cease-fire in place," L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, said Sunday in a broadcast interview. "What were trying to do is simply get the forces to stop firing."
About a third of the city's population of 200,000 fled Friday and Saturday, though Marines turned back any military-age men trying to leave, said Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne, commander of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment.
During the lull, Marines distributed food to residents.
"Families are holed up in houses. They have been told to stay inside. But they are running out of water and food," said Marine Capt. Jason Smith, 30, from Baton Rogue, La.
In fighting across the country since April 4 — including in Fallujah and in the uprising by the militia of radical Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in the south — 47 American soldiers and nearly 900 Iraqis have been killed. At least 649 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq since the war began in March 2003.
In southern Iraq, some 1.5 million Shiite pilgrims marked one of their holiest religious days, al-Arbaeen. In the city of Karbala, hundreds of Shiite militiamen — but no police — patrolled the street preparing for a possible U.S. assault against rebellious followers of al-Sadr.
U.S. commanders have suggested they will move against al-Sadr, whose militia has control of Karbala and two other cities, after the al-Arbaeen ceremonies, which mark the end of a 40-day mourning period for a 7th-century martyred Shiite saint.
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