US forces were in control of most of the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah yesterday and claimed to have cornered the remnants of the As the assault entered its fifth day, US tanks rolled freely, while thousands of US troops, backed by Iraqi soldiers, moved house-to-house to root out pockets of insurgents. "What is left (to take), comparatively speaking, is a small piece of what we started with," said Marine spokesman Lt. Lyle Gilbert. A relentless barrage of US firepower over the past week has turned Fallujah into a ghost city. Some troops swept quickly through the city from end to end, seizing key positions such as mosques, schools and government buildings, while others followed with the perilous task of rooting out the rebels, who the Marines say have become more desperate as their stronghold crumbles. The building-to-building searches uncovered Mohammed Al-Jundi, the Syrian driver who was taken hostage with French journalists Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot seized by militants south of Baghdad on Aug. 20. Marines said they blew up one of the houses on Thursday where foreign and Iraqi hostages appeared to have been slaughtered. Inside the building, they said they had found grisly videotapes of captives, a camera and a black flag of the sort used as a backdrop in hostage footage sent by militants to television stations or posted on the Internet. Aid agencies called on US forces and the Iraqi government to allow them to deliver food, medicine and water to Fallujah and said the fighting had turned the city into a "big disaster".
| What was it before the assault? A garden of earthly delights? |