Marines battled a large force of Iraqi insurgents near the Syrian border yesterday in fighting that killed five Marines. At least 10 Iraqis, including the city police chief, were also killed, according to a hospital official.
Meanwhile, US forces waited outside Najaf yesterday with no sign of a breakthrough in efforts to avert a bloody confrontation with rebel cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in an Iraqi city holy to the world's Shiite Muslims.
Fallujah, Iraq's other main flashpoint and a bastion for Sunni Muslim insurgents, was enjoying a second day of calm.
But five civilians were killed as they tried to escape overnight shelling by US forces in the nearby town of Karma, witnesses said.
The US military said an American soldier had been killed and two wounded when their patrol hit an anti-tank mine near Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit on Friday.
On the Syrian border yesterday, fighting at the town of Husaybah appeared to be a new spillover of the intensified insurgent violence in the western towns of Fallujah and Ramadi.
It began when insurgents ambushed Marines in the city on Saturday, sparking a 14-hour-battle with hundreds of gunmen. Fighting continued yesterday in three neighborhoods of the city, which was sealed off by US forces.
Five Marines were killed in the initial ambush and nine more were wounded throughout the fighting, an embedded journalist from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
Ten Iraqis were killed and 30 wounded -- a mixture of insurgent fighters and civilian bystanders, said Hamid al-Alousi, a doctor at the hospital in the nearby city of Qaim, 300km west of Baghdad.
Some were shot by Marine snipers as they left their homes to use their outdoor toilets behind their houses, the doctor told the Arab television station Al-Arabiyah.
Husaybah police director Imad al-Mahlawi was one of those killed by American snipers, according to a man who identified himself as al-Mahlawi's cousin, Adel Ezzeddin, Al-Arabiya reported.
Since March 31, at least 94 US soldiers have died in action in Iraq -- more than were killed during the three weeks last year between the invasion of Iraq and the fall of Saddam.
Tension remained high in Najaf, where 2,500 US troops are poised nearby with orders to kill or capture Sadr.
A spokesman for the fiery cleric said on Saturday that negotiations were at a dead end. A US spokesman denied any direct talks had taken place, although he said Iraq's US-led administration was keen to avoid bloodshed in Najaf.
Caught in the face-off between US troops and Sadr's Mehdi Army militia, Najaf residents complained their lives and livelihoods were at risk with shops closed and streets around the city's shrines crowded with gunmen instead of pilgrims.
Sadr's supporters say Iraq's top Shiite clerics back the uprising they staged this month against the US-led occupiers.
"We know that any assault from the Americans on the holy city of Najaf will be the zero hour for the revolution all over Iraq," said Sadr's spokesman, Qays al-Khazali. "The religious authority has a clear stand in providing us with moral support."
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