U.S. offers truce to Falluja fighters

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BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The U.S. military has offered a new ceasefire deal in the Sunni town of Falluja after nearly a week of fighting that has killed hundreds of people.

"Coalition forces are prepared to implement a ceasefire with enemy elements in Falluja commencing at noon (9 a.m. British time) today," Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt told a news conference on Saturday.

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

In Baghdad, street fighting erupted as youths with rifles and grenade launchers battled U.S. troops in a Sunni Muslim area, witnesses say.

Dozens of gunmen, their faces masked with Arab headdresses, shot at U.S. troops from alleyways in the staunchly Sunni district of Adhimiya in northwestern Baghdad.

Witnesses said fresh clashes had also erupted in Falluja despite a unilateral ceasefire declared by the Americans on Friday.

In other attacks, Reuters television film showed a blazing truck that witnesses said had been hit by a roadside bomb aimed at a U.S. convoy on the airport road. A Reuters photographer saw a burning tank on a highway leading west from Baghdad.

More than a million Shi'ites were set to mark the holy day of Arbain in the shrine city of Kerbala on Saturday, prompting fears among U.S. officials of more chaos and bloodshed.

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.

The U.S. truce offer came after Iraqi politicians demanded a halt to the worst fighting since Saddam Hussein's fall.

A statement by the U.S.-installed Governing Council criticised "military solutions and the policy of collective punishment that has fallen on innocent civilians". It demanded "an immediate ceasefire 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, several of whose members resigned or threatened 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.

U.S. Marines were ordered to suspend offensive operations in Falluja at midday on Friday, but this did not halt fighting.

UPRISING IN SOUTH

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 U.S. forces there had killed nine people and wounded 35.

A spate of kidnapping has added to the turmoil in Iraq, where gunmen are holding three Japanese and several other foreign hostages.

The Pentagon said two U.S. 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 in a village in the Abu Ghraib district. Gunmen holding them said they were Italian.

The U.S.-led administration says more than a million pilgrims are in Kerbala for Arbain and has warned it cannot guarantee their safety.

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.

U.S. 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.

U.S. 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. "..But I still believe that most Iraqis are with us," he told Fox News.

The sound of explosions, probably mortar fire, boomed across Baghdad on Friday night but there were no reports of casualties.

At least 51 U.S. and allied soldiers have been killed in this week's fighting. Two U.S. soldiers and a civilian truck driver were killed on Friday, the military said. A British civilian working for a U.S. security firm was also killed.

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

For some U.S. allies, the surge in fighting and kidnapping will fuel debate on the wisdom of keeping their troops in Iraq.

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, under fire at home for sending troops, said he had no plans to withdraw them despite the kidnapping of the three Japanese civilians.

A previously unknown Iraqi group released a video of the hostages on Thursday and vowed to "burn them alive" if Japanese troops did not leave Iraq within three days.

(Source: Yahoo News)