Ambush outside Fallujah kills 10 Marines

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Ten U.S. Marines died Thursday when a makeshift bomb blasted their foot patrol outside the western city of Fallujah, the military reported Friday. It was the deadliest attack on U.S. forces in almost four months.

Eleven other Marines were wounded by the explosion, which came from a device made up of several large artillery shells, the military said. Seven of the injured Marines returned to duty.

The troops killed in Fallujah were from Regimental Combat Team 8 of the 2nd Marine Division based at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. John Holmason, 21, of Scappoose, Ore., was among those killed, his stepmother, Paula Holmason, said Friday.

The military also announced Friday that three soldiers had died in a vehicle accident north of Baghdad and a Marine in Ramadi was killed Thursday when the vehicle he was riding in was struck by a rocket.

The attack in Fallujah came a day after President Bush outlined his strategy for victory in Iraq, and at a time when there are growing calls for an exit plan for U.S. troops.

The 14 deaths announced by the military Friday brought to at least 2,127 U.S. troops have died since the beginning of the war, according to an Associated Press count.

Just over a year ago, thousands of U.S. and Iraqi troops leveled much of Fallujah — which had become Iraq's main insurgent stronghold — in the largest offensive since the 2003 invasion. During two weeks of fighting, they established a strict cordon around the city, 35 miles west of Baghdad, with four heavily guarded entry points equipped with metal detectors and bomb-sniffing dogs.

Following the assault, according to local politicians and military commanders, Fallujah had gradually become one of the safest and most stable cities in Anbar province, which spans the vast desert west of Baghdad to the Syrian border and is considered the heartland of the country's Sunni Arab-led insurgency. In August, 14 Marines were killed by a roadside bomb that tore apart their armored personnel carrier in the Anbar city of Haditha, but Fallujah has experienced little heavy fighting and few large-scale attacks in recent months.

The city's police force, disbanded before the offensive last year, has returned to duty and numbers about 1,200, local officials said. A pair of Iraqi army battalions patrol much of the northern half of the city, together with a battalion of U.S. Marines. And while turnout in Anbar for Iraq's October constitutional referendum was only about 40 percent, it topped 90 percent in Fallujah, a city of about 250,000.

"One year ago, major combat operations in Fallujah, and in the referendum, 200,000 folks voted in Fallujah," the main U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, said this week. "Great improvement."

On a visit to the city this week, the provincial governor, Mamoun Sami Rashid, spent the first half of a 10-minute speech praising the city's progress. "The first thing that came to my mind when I entered Fallujah is the stability," said Rashid, who rarely leaves the violence-plagued provincial capital, Ramadi, and has survived at least seven assassination attempts since taking office June 1. "What you had before the invasion is what we have in Ramadi now."

But insurgents retained a strong presence and continue to operate in Fallujah, according to soldiers and Iraqi politicians and civilians interviewed there this week.

"We knew al-Qaida wouldn't leave the city, and it happened. They came back," said Khalid Muhsin, a preacher in a local mosque. "Now they attack in different ways. They kidnap and assassinate people. People in the city are tired of the fighting and want to rest."

On Tuesday, gunmen shot dead Hamza Abbas Asawi, the city's top religious cleric, as he was leaving an evening prayer service. Asawi was considered an ally by U.S. forces. A day later, two Marines were killed by small-arms fire.

The last lethal car bombing in Fallujah was in early summer, but roadside bombs and sniper fire are constant threats, said Lt. Patrick Keane, of Aberdeen, N.J. Keane is a member of the 8th Marine Regiment, which patrols the city.

Asked how many insurgents there were in Fallujah, a U.S. official said, "It's hard to say, but there's sympathy for the insurgency. Basically everyone here has the potential to be an insurgent."

Residents still complain that heavily guarded checkpoints are dangerous and stifle economic activity, and that U.S. soldiers on patrol are too willing to shoot first when encountering residents.

After the offensive last year, much of the city lay in ruins.

"It was like an earthquake," said Farouk Abd-Muhammed, a local engineer who is running for a national assembly seat on Dec. 15. "After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was Fallujah."

The Iraqi government authorized $105 million to rebuild houses damaged in the fighting. Nearly all of that money has now been dispersed, an amount representing about 40 percent of the assessed value of the damaged properties, a State Department representative said.

A drive this week along the city's main thoroughfares showed some new buildings and others that were still bombed-out shells or pocked with bullet holes.

Elsewhere in Iraq on Friday, U.S. and Iraqi troops waged separate offensives in Ramadi and in Hit, another Anbar city. No coalition casualties were reported in either operation.

Meanwhile, Al Jazeera television broadcast a videotape and statement in which insurgent kidnappers holding four Christian peace activists — two Canadians, a Briton and an American — threatened to kill them by Thursday unless all prisoners in U.S. and Iraqi detention centers are released.

Also Friday, officials of Iraq's Interior Ministry said it had banned all non-Iraqi Arabs from entering the country until further notice. They called it a pre-election security measure.

Information from the Los Angeles Times and The Associated Press

is included in this report.