20 insurgents die in Fallujah

By Seattle Times news services

	HAYNE PALMOUR IV / AP An explosion from a 500-pound laser-guided bomb dropped from an Air Force jet destroys a building where Iraqi insurgents were seen firing weapons at Marines in Fallujah yesterday.
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BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraq's violence continued yesterday as U.S. Marines killed 20 insurgents in renewed fighting in Fallujah, threatening a tenuous cease-fire.

Meanwhile, Iraqi officials said a string of suicide car-bombings in the southern city of Basra that killed at least 68 people — including kindergarten and middle-school students struck in passing school vans — appeared to be synchronized and well-planned.

The growing security problems in the run-up to a return to Iraqi self-rule June 30 have sparked the first signs of a split within the U.S.-led coalition.

Spain said Sunday it will pull out its troops and Honduras and the Dominican Republic followed suit. Yesterday, Poland said it is reconsidering the future of its troops in Iraq.

The killings in Basra, which is under British control, were particularly jarring since the predominantly Shiite Muslim city has enjoyed relative peace and prosperity since the end of the war.

The four car bombs went off in front of police stations and a police academy. Two buses carrying kindergarten students and middle-school girls were hit by one of the blasts.

Officials in Basra said they believed al-Qaida forces were to blame.

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt called the attacks "horrendous" and blamed terrorists rather than former Saddam Hussein loyalists.

Iraqi officials in the capital said the Basra attacks bore the hallmarks of similar terrorist bombings in other cities, including the Shiite holy city of Karbala and the northern Kurdish city of Irbil, over the past several months.

Officials in Basra said that up to 16 children and nine police officers were killed, and that of about 200 wounded, 168 were in critical condition. Four British soldiers were among those injured.

Basra residents threw stones at other British troops who rushed to the police stations to assist. Several thousand British soldiers have been stationed in Basra for the past year, and they have maintained mostly peaceful relations with residents.

The British have about 8,700 soldiers stationed in Iraq, down from about 40,000 during the war. Unlike their U.S. counterparts to the north, British forces have maintained stable relations with Shiite leaders. British casualties generally have been light.

The Iraqi Governing Council condemned the killings, along with a mortar attack Tuesday at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad that killed 22 detainees.

In northwest Fallujah, a stronghold of anti-American feeling, U.S. Marines clashed with insurgents in two "fairly robust engagements," Kimmitt said. Three Marines were injured in a gunbattle that left 20 insurgents dead.

The fighting came as coalition and Iraqi officials continue talks for a permanent peace deal in the city.

Marines said that upward of 100 insurgents were involved in the battle and that many seemed to rush toward U.S. positions in what 1st Sgt. James Madden called "almost a suicidelike attack."

Even the presence of tanks did not deter the fighters, some Marines said. They attacked the tanks with rocket-propelled grenades but either missed their targets or the grenades bounced off the armored vehicles, which then responded with massive firepower. Cobra and Huey helicopters raked buildings with gunfire, and the bombs dropped by the F-16s flattened several structures.

The attackers used neighborhood mosques as gathering spots and one mosque blared out martial music from its minaret and issued a call for residents to "rise up in a jihad against the Americans."

The Marines said they chose not to target the mosque and used a public-address system to answer back in Arabic.

Marines more than two weeks ago encircled the city of about 300,000 about 35 miles west of Baghdad after four U.S. contractors were ambushed and their bodies dragged through the streets and mutilated.

Complied from USA Today, Los Angeles Times and Knight Ridder Newspapers reports.

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