Fallouja

More than 10 weeks after the grisly killing and mutilation of four U.S. contract workers turned this town into an emblem of Iraq's wildfire insurgency, Fallouja has become a symbol of a different sort. In the wake of a truce last month that averted an all-out assault by U.S.

Marines battled insurgents for hours in the volatile city of Fallouja, killing 20 Iraqis and wounding 14 others in a series of gunfights, mortar barrages and airstrikes, military officials said Friday. Many of those wounded, including at least one child, appeared to be civilians injured by U.S. airstrikes, Iraqi hospital officials said. The U.S. military said insurgents started the fighting Thursday night by ambushing a patrol and then fleeing into buildings to continue the battle.

U.S. forces pushed into southern Fallouja on Thursday after achieving many of their objectives elsewhere in the city. Continued heavy fighting in some areas increased the toll to 18 U.S. soldiers and five Iraqi officers killed since the beginning of the operation, press officers here said. Violence flared elsewhere in the country. In Baghdad, a powerful car bomb ripped across a busy shopping street, killing at least 20 people and wounding 30, police on the scene said.

As Yassir Harhoush sees it, the work he'll be doing for the new U.S.-sanctioned Fallouja Brigade isn't all that different from what he was doing last week -- only then, he says, he was part of the insurgency. "I was fighting the Americans," Harhoush, a 28-year-old former soldier in Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard, said Friday afternoon. "I have not stopped. This is just a temporary truce. If the Americans attack, we will defend ourselves again."

camp pendleton -- The Marine Corps announced Monday that it has charged a Marine sergeant with murder in connection with the killing of an unarmed Iraqi prisoner during fighting in the city of Fallouja in late 2004. Sgt. Jermaine A. Nelson was charged with one count of unpremeditated murder Thursday, the same day that a charge was unsealed in federal court in Riverside against former Marine Jose Luis Nazario Jr. in the same incident.

By all accounts, the battle of Fallouja has been fierce. But it is hardly the conclusive showdown with Iraq's insurgents that, in a simpler war or in a simpler world, it might have been. Even if the small Iraqi city once harbored a large body of enemy fighters, including the notorious killer Abu Musab Zarqawi, there are plenty of reasons why we should no longer expect to find them there.

Large swaths of Iraq remain outside the control of the interim government, major highways are fraught with attackers, and interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi -- along with the U.S. Embassy and much of the international community -- must conduct business in fortified compounds guarded by tanks, blast walls and barbed wire. In Washington, Allawi gave Congress an upbeat assessment Thursday, but the situation in Iraq is more complicated.

Marines just outside the insurgent stronghold of Fallouja were making final preparations Friday for a large-scale offensive that U.S. commanders and diplomats on the ground in Baghdad now describe as all but inevitable. "We are gearing up to do an operation," said Brig. Gen. Dennis J. Hejlik, deputy commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force. Speaking to reporters at a base near Fallouja, Hejlik said: "If we're told to go, we're going to go. And when we go ...

U.S. warplanes bombed the volatile city of Fallouja early today, and flames and smoke rose from its southern neighborhoods, witnesses said. The U.S. military had no immediate comment. In Baghdad, meanwhile, one U.S. soldier was killed and two others were wounded Monday when their patrol was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, military officials said. In other violence, assailants in Tikrit, 100 miles north of Baghdad, killed one Turkish citizen and two Iraqis, Maj.

Iraqi troops led by one of Saddam Hussein's former generals began replacing Marines here Friday as a plan to end a near-monthlong siege of this battle-torn city gained momentum. Former Iraqi Maj. Gen. Jassim Mohammed Saleh, dressed in the uniform of Hussein's Republican Guard, entered Fallouja to cheering crowds, triggering a debate on whether securing the defiant city with an Iraqi force was a masterstroke or a concession that could undermine U.S. control of the country.