FALLUJAH, Iraq (AFP) - Thousands of US-led troops backed by aircraft and tanks launched a battle to retake the rebel Iraqi city of Fallujah, as a US general said more assaults on insurgent areas were likely.
After troops seized a hospital and two key bridges early Monday on Fallujah`s western edge, creating a natural barrier there to the rebels out of the Euphrates river, artillery and warplanes mercilessly pounded the city.
In a new effort just after sunset to reassert control ahead of key elections scheduled for January, some 3,000 marines advanced a kilometre (half a mile) inside the city in what has been dubbed Operation Phantom Fury.
The marines stormed the Jolan district in the northwest of Fallujah -- a notorious stronghold of rebels holed-up in the city -- while another unit took the Iraqi city`s train station, a marine officer said.
According to the commander of US forces in Iraq, General George Casey, about 15,000 US troops and more than five Iraqi battalions are involved. Other officials put the size of the force at about 10,000 US troops and 2,000 Iraqis.
An estimated 2,000 to 2,500 fighters, some loyal to Iraq`s most wanted man, Abu Musab Zarqawi, are in and around the city ready to fight. The US military has said it believes that another 10,000 men could join in the battle.
In the middle of night fighting, the number of casualties was difficult to assess. Earlier, Arab states appealed for both sides to spare civilian lives.
In Washington, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the forces would fight to the end to retake predominantly Sunni Muslim Fallujah, after a siege there ended in a shaky negotiated peace agreement.
"I could not imagine that it would stop without being completed," he said. Asked whether the operation would be pressed to the end, he said, "Absolutely."
However, in relatively cautious comments, he told reporters that he believed the insurgents were determined to resist.
"I think it`s a tough business, and it`s going to take time," he said.
The chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, warned that while the assault would probably be the biggest on the insurgents, more attacks on rebel strongholds are likely.
"This will not be the last use of force in Iraq to rid Iraq of the former regime elements and the foreign fighters who do not want Iraq to be successful," Myers told a Pentagon press conference.
"There will be other opportunities, maybe not as dramatic and as big as Fallujah but other opportunities."
According to Iraqi Defence Minister Sheikh Hazem Shaalan, a large-scale operation to retake Fallujah itself will begin at sunrise on Tuesday.
"We`ve called it Operation Dawn. God willing, it`s going to be a new, happy dawn for the people of Fallujah," he said.
The offensive was given the green light by Iraq`s Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, who also visited troops taking part ahead of the battle at a US camp just outside the city, around 60 kilometres (35 miles) west of Baghdad.
"The people of Fallujah have been taken hostage just like the people of Samarra and you need to free them from their (the insurgents`) grip," he told the soldiers, reported an AFP journalist embedded with the military.
"Your job is to arrest the killers but if you kill them then let it be," he said and told them not to harm civilians.
In the initial clashes of a battle that could prove the most intense since last year`s war to topple Saddam Hussein, Allawi said that 38 insurgents had been killed and four foreign fighters detained, including two Moroccans.
Earlier the embattled premier announced a stringent package of security measures to protect Iraq during the attempt to recapture the city, including a curfew in Fallujah and the closure of Baghdad`s international airport.
They followed his imposing the previous day of a 60-day state of emergency.
US troops banned the movement of men in and out of Fallujah and the surrounding area, saying that anyone who left would not be able to return.
"Attention, attention! All men aged between 15 and 50 are forbidden from entering or exiting (the area)," loudspeakers on top of US vehicles declared in Arabic as they drove around the outskirts of the city.
"Only women and children are allowed to leave on condition that they do not return until order is restored."
Rebels have transformed Fallujah into their fiefdom since a marine assault in April ended in stalemate and left hundreds dead.
US and Iraqi troops have been massing there since mid-October, while the US military is doubling its manpower in Fallujah`s sister city of Ramadi to 2,000 amid expectations of a double-pronged assault to regain control.
Elsewhere in Iraq, at least 14 people, including a British and a US soldier, were killed and more than 60 people wounded in a spate of attacks that coincided with the assault.
At least three people were killed and 45 wounded when two suspected car bombs exploded within minutes of each other outside two Christian churches in southern Baghdad, doctors said.
Dr Meshaan Mahdi of nearby Yarmuk hospital, where many of the victims were taken, said women and children were among them.
Two hours later, a stolen police car laden with explosives blew up outside the hospital`s emergency unit, nearly destroying the building and killing or wounding an unknown number of people, a hospital official and a witness said.
Precise casualty figures were impossible to obtain late Monday.
11/09/2004 - 00:08 GMT - AFP