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US Forces Withdraw from Falluja in Hard and Bloody Fighting
From Jihad Unspun Mafkarat al-Islam is reporting that after extremely hard and bloody fighting, US forces had withdrawn from the ash-Shuhada' and al-Jubayl neighborhoods in Fallujah, which they had intensively assaulted since early morning. Fighting raged there from 8am until around sunset at 5pm, and before that, the Americans had overrun Mujahideen positions in an-Nazal neighborhood, from which the Mujahideen withdrew. The correspondent reported that before they pulled back at sunset, US troops used loudspeakers from a distance of 500 meters to call on the Mujahideen to surrender themselves to the occupation, after claiming that Mujahideen commanders Abdallah al-Jannabi and Umar Hadid had "fled from the battlefield, leaving their fighters to face death," as they put it. Mujahideen responded to the US verbal assault with a barrage of forty 82mm and 120mm mortar rounds. After that the Americans pulled back towards the an-Nazal neighborhood. The correspondent of Mafkarat al-Islam spoke to the commander of a Mujahideen organization, Shaykh Abu Abdallah Amir who confirmed that the commander Abdallah al-Jannabi was alive and that the commander Umar Hadid was with him, and both of them are leading their fighters at this time. Shaykh Abu 'Abdallah added that the Mujahideen were burying the martyrs in the courtyards of houses and car parks, noting that the losses inflicted on the Americans had been extremely heavy, compared with those suffered by the Mujahideen, despite the disparity in the number of fighters and amount of equipment on both sides. Shaykh Abu Abdallah said that more than 450 US troops had been killed and 200 more wounded according to Mujahideen military estimates. More than 140 US tanks and armored vehicles have been destroyed, in addition 53 Humvees were set ablaze, five US helicopters had been shot down, including three Apaches and one fighter airplane, as well as six unmanned spyplanes. "We also succeeded in capturing 18 US troops, three of them wounded," said Shaykh Abu 'Abdallah. This followed 26 who were reportedly captured early in the day in the an-Nazal neighborhood who were later killed when the Mujahideen were forced to evacuate that area, since it would have been extremely difficult to transport them out of there. Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2005-01-08 |
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