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US moves on Iraqi rebel stronghold of Fallujah
US ground troops advanced on the Iraqi rebel bastion of Fallujah on Friday after a night of deadly air assaults...Before dawn, 1,000 US group troops, along with tanks and Iraqi special forces, rumbled toward Fallujah in a bid to flush out Zarqawi, said to be the top Al-Qaeda operative in Iraq, after attempts to hammer out a truce collapsed. "Units are pushing forward... Their mission is to disrupt the enemy's ability to conduct terror attacks in this area of operations, specifically in the city of Fallujah... They'll do whatever it takes to accomplish that," said marines spokesman Lyle Gilbert. The deployment was the biggest around Fallujah, the epicentre of the insurgency, since last April when marines and rebels battled to a draw in the community of 200,000 people, leaving it in the hands of radical Islamists for months. Gilbert declined to say if the troops had yet entered the rebel bastion, but a storming of the city loomed after Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said Fallujah should surrender Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born fighter with a 25-million dollar price on his head, or face a military assault. Adding to the tensions, a senior religious figure from the rebel stronghold, Sheikh Mahmud Abdel Aziz, called for protests over the US operations and warned of "holy war" if the onslaught continued... AFP report, so take cum grano salis. Posted by: Anonymoose 2004-10-16 |
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