FALLUJAH, Iraq (AFP) - US warplanes pounded the Iraqi insurgent-held town of Fallujah for a third time in just over 24 hours killing at least two people in an ongoing push to wrest hotspots from rebel hands ahead of January polls.
The pre-dawn strike took place just hours after US and Iraqi officials said Samarra, another violence-wracked city, was largely under control after a military offensive that left some 150 people dead.
It was one of the largest US-led operations aimed at crushing the insurgents since the April 2003 overthrow of president Saddam Hussein. But the rebels have continued to fight on, claiming daily victims.
Iraqi national guards found the decapitated body of a man and the corpse of a woman who had been shot dead but their nationality was unknown, medics said on Sunday.
A senior US military official warned that the militants' shock tactics, such as hostage beheadings, had the potential to backfire by uniting world opinion against them.
The outskirts of Fallujah were smouldering again after US warplanes bombed a building where the military said between 10 and 15 insurgents suspected of links with Iraq's most wanted man Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi had been shifting weapons.
"A large number of enemy fighters are presumed killed," the army said, without giving an exact toll.
Medics in the town said two people had been killed and 10 wounded.
The onslaught followed two earlier missions around the Sunni Arab enclave west of Baghdad, again targeting suspected Zarqawi hideouts. One on Friday left several women and children dead, according to hospital officials.
Meanwhile in Samarra, a key bastion in the Sunni insurgent belt north of the Iraqi capital, hospital officials were still attending the dead after a massive US-Iraqi offensive on Friday and into Saturday that killed at least 150 people.
The hospital corridor smelled of decomposing bodies as staff wearing surgical masks lifted corpses out of the building one after the other, shouting out names as they reached the front doors.
Despite the bloodshed, Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib said the mission was the most successful to date, and hinted at more action to regain control of no-go areas.
But a leading Sunni Muslim religious group criticised the US-Iraqi operations, calling them "massacres" and warning of "grave consequences" if such a strategy was not reversed.
Desperate to thwart the US-led efforts to rebuild Iraq following last year's invasion and the creation of an interim Iraqi government, militant groups have unleashed a murderous campaign of bombings and kidnappings.
Underscoring the dangers, a hospital official in the town of Mahmudiyah, 40 kilometres (25 miles) south of Baghdad, said Iraqi forces had brought in a headless man and the body of a woman on Saturday night without ID papers.
Meanwhile, the life of a Jordanian hostage hung in the balance after his captors on Saturday threatened to kill him in 72 hours if his employer failed to halt its Iraq operations.
The firm responded almost immediately by announcing it ceased all its activities in the war-torn country.
Another militant group posted a video on its website showing an Iraqi man being beheaded after "confessing" he was a contractor for US forces.
Meanwhile, the family of British engineer Kenneth Bigley, held hostage in Iraq for more than two weeks, has asked Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi to help secure his release, they said on Sunday.
Paul Bigley, the captive's brother, said he had telephoned Saif Kadhafi, one of the Libyan leader's sons, asking if Tripoli could intervene to win the 62-year-old's freedom.
As families in Britain, France, Inonesia and elsewhere waited for news of their loved ones held hostage in the country, US Brigadier General Erv Lessel said the militants may regret their grisly actions.
"The tactic of increasingly violent and shocking terrorist acts has the potential to backfire by increasingly turning Iraqi and world public opinion against the terrorists," Lessel, the chief spokesman for the US-led forces in Iraq, told AFP.
Separately, the US-led military said that South Korean troops have taken over control of relief and reconstruction efforts in a Kurdish province of northern Iraq.
Scores of Iraqi Kurds took to the streets of Kirkuk on Sunday to demand that Arab families settled in the northern oil centre by Saddam's regime now leave and to claim the city as part of an autonomous Kurdish region.
The question of the Kurds' return and the continuing presence of Arabs installed in the city has fuelled tensions in Kirkuk, which is also inhabited by Turkmen.
On the political front, neighbouring Iran announced Sunday it intended to take part in a US-proposed international conference on election plans for Iraq scheduled to take place in Egypt next month.
"In principle, taking part in the conference does not pose a problem for us," foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters, adding the Islamic republic "welcomes all initiatives that favour stability in Iraq."
"The details on our participation will be announced later," he added.