Seven dead in US air raids on Fallujah

BAGHDAD, Oct 22 (AFP) - US aircraft and artillery strikes pounded suspected weapons warehouses in the insurgent bastion of Fallujah overnight leaving seven people dead and three others wounded, hospital officials said as hundreds of British troops prepared to move closer to Baghdad to help crush rebel strongholds.
The Fallujah general hospital`s Dr Saleh Hussein said most victims had been evacuated from the Shuhada district.
The US army earlier said that two raids were carried out in the area late Thursday.
US marine spokesman Lieutenant Lyle Gilbert said that marines carried out new air raids and opened artillery fire at arms caches in the southeast of the city.
The marines said they were eliminating weapons warehouses in the area, considered a hub for suspected Al-Qaeda operative Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi.
"It`s artillery you hear ... (and) AC-130 aircraft are engaging known weapons caches in southeastern Fallujah," said Gilbert after artillery and air strikes shook Fallujah.
An AFP correspondent reported thunderous booms shaking the city`s southern Shuhada district. Flames lit the sky, while US aircraft droned overhead, he added.
Gilbert said the attacks on the weapons warehouses were triggering secondary explosives.
Earlier, marines and insurgents clashed when rebels fired on marine positions with "small arms, RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) and mortars near the city" at 5:00 pm (1400 GMT), the military said.
"Marines countered these attacks with substantial and proportionate ground fires and air-delivered precision strikes."
Fallujah has seen almost daily strikes on suspected safe houses of Zarqawi, blamed for many of the car bombings and kidnappings in Iraq.
Determined to regain control of the no-go zone, more than 1,000 joint forces have encircled the city for the last week. Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi last week ordered Fallujah residents to surrender Zarqawi or face invasion.
Allawi on Thursday narrowly escaped a mortar attack while on a trip to Mosul, in the north of the country, as officials expressed concern about a lack of experts on the ground to help prepare for landmark elections set for January because of security fears.
Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari lamented the fact that the dangerous climate was keeping UN experts out of the country.
The United Nations largely pulled out of Iraq after its Baghdad headquarters was targeted in a suicide car bombing in August 2003 that killed 22 staff.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell said US-led forces in Iraq would protect UN workers helping organize the elections if enough troops from other countries cannot be found.
"Fiji has made an offer and there are one or two other countries that we are working with to see if they will make a contribution," Powell said in an interview with Abu Dhabi television.
"If we don`t get enough through that means, then the coalition will have to deal with the security need of the United Nations," he said.
In London, British Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon agreed to an unprecedented US request to redeploy 850 crack troops to a volatile area southwest of Baghdad, freeing up US soldiers for an expected assault on Fallujah.
The redeployment marks the first time since the March 2003 invasion of Iraq that British soldiers have left the south of the country for US-controlled areas, where they will be at increased risk of attack, but they appeared to be ready for action.
"There is a sense of relief that they have been told what to do so now they are focusing on the job in hand," said Major Charles Mayo, spokesman for the British-led multinational forces based in Iraq`s second city of Basra.
"They are now making preparations for moving," Mayo told AFP by telephone, though he declined to say when the contingent would head northwards.
Britain has about 8,500 troops in the relatively calm south, mostly around Basra, compared to almost 140,000 US troops in the centre and north.
Underscoring the uphill struggle to restore stability, there was no news on the Baghdad chief of international aid group CARE, Margaret Hassan, a British-Iraqi national, who was taken hostage by gunmen on Tuesday.
Separately, Iraq`s Oil Minister Thamer Ghadban said attacks on Iraq`s oil infrastructure and its import of oil products due to insufficient refining capacity has cost the country seven billion dollars since March 2003.
At a US military court in Baghdad, Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick was sentenced to eight years in prison and expelled from the army for abusing inmates at Baghdad`s Abu Ghraib jail, as the hearing of another US soldier charged with murdering an Iraqi opened.
Frederick, the highest-ranking official to be tried so far in the prison abuse case, had pleaded guilty to a range of five charges from making hooded inmates masturbate to punching them in the chest.
Frederick was the first of three military police due to be court martialled in Baghdad this week for their alleged part in abuse at Abu Ghraib.
A senior Democratic senator meanwhile released a report Thursday alleging that the US Pentagon exaggerated the military risks posed by Iraq before the US-led war there to support a decision already taken by the White House to invade the country.
In a statement, Senator Carl Levin, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said a months-long probe conducted by his staff of prewar intelligence showed that the US Defense Department tailored its analysis to the George W. Bush administration`s liking, after "assessments of the intelligence community did not make a sufficiently compelling case" for invasion.

10/22/2004 01:29 GMT - AFP