US pounds Falluja diehards

US artillery pummelled Falluja yesterday and troops hunted guerillas still fighting days after Washington said its offensive had destroyed rebel control of the Sunni Muslim city west of Baghdad.

Further north, where violence has surged since the US assault on Falluja began last Monday, 15 Iraqis were killed and 22 wounded in the oil refining town of Baiji. A suicide car bomber rammed a US convoy, prompting troops to open fire.

US officers in Falluja said Marines were "cleaning up" remaining Iraqi and foreign Islamists and Saddam Hussein loyalists, and Iraq's interim government said some 1,600 rebels lay dead in the rubble.

Mortar fire and heavy explosive rounds crashed on areas where insurgents were believed still to be holding out.

There was trouble elsewhere in the heartlands of the formerly dominant Sunni Muslim minority, where some fear an election due in January will hand national power to the Shi'ite majority.

After the bombing in Baiji, US troops fought insurgents and sealed off the oil refinery to protect it.

Witnesses said the bomb, which blew up in a market area near the city centre, damaged a US armoured vehicle and wounded some soldiers, prompting them to open fire.

A US military spokesman confirmed that a suicide bomber drove into a US convoy but had no information on casualties.

In Ramadi, just west of Falluja, nine Iraqis were killed and 15 wounded when US forces confronted large groups of rocket- and mortar-firing gunmen who fanned out through the streets, hospital officials and witnesses said.

Iraq's third city Mosul, another Sunni stronghold in the north, was quiet after days of clashes. But the road north from Baghdad remained dangerous and three Turkish truck drivers were killed in two ambushes, police said.

Iraq's fledgling security forces, set up under US control to replace Saddam's discredited authorities, were targeted again. But for once, a group of unarmed police recruits was able to outwit guerillas who have killed dozens of their comrades.

Held up by gunmen at a desert hotel in Rutba on their way home from training in Jordan, 35 recruits from the southern, Shi'ite city of Kerbala hid their police papers and pretended to be businessmen, Kerbala's police chief told Reuters. After three hours, the gunmen departed.

Washington has said senior militants, including Jordanian al Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, probably escaped Falluja before it was attacked. It is not clear how widely coordinated insurgent activity is, so it is hard to assess whether violence in other Sunni towns has been led by figures formerly based in Falluja or is simply a reaction to events there.

More widely, the bloodshed in Falluja, including the alleged shooting dead of an unarmed, wounded guerilla in a mosque by a US Marine has provoked dismay among many in Iraq and the Arab world, where US President George W. Bush hoped Saddam's overthrow would foster stability.

One of the most prominent critics of last year's US-led invasion spoke out again yesterday:

"I'm not at all sure that one can say the world is safer," said French President Jacques Chirac on the eve of a visit to Mr Bush's closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

"There is no doubt there has been an increase in terrorism... To a certain extent Saddam Hussein's departure was a positive thing but it also provoked reaction such as the mobilisation in a number of countries of men and women of Islam which has made the world more dangerous."