Issue date: 4/12/04 Section: News

Members of Echo Company bow their heads in silence at a memorial service at Combat Outpost in Ramadi, Iraq, Sunday. Second Battalion, 4th Marines Echo Company has lost 12 marines in the last week. (DAVID SWANSON / krt )

FALLUJAH, Iraq - A fragile cease-fire held between Sunni insurgents and U.S. Marines on Sunday in the besieged city of Fallujah, where Iraqis said more than 600 civilians were killed in the past week. Near Baghdad, gunmen shot down a U.S. attack helicopter, killing two crewmembers.
Also, the military suggested it is open to a negotiated solution in its showdown with a radical Shiite cleric in the south.

Most of the Iraqis killed in Fallujah in fighting that started last Monday were women, children and elderly, the director of the city hospital, Rafie al-Issawi, told The Associated Press. A U.S. Marine commander disputed that, saying most of the dead were probably insurgents.

Fallujah residents took advantage of the lull in fighting to bury their dead in two soccer fields. One of the fields had rows of freshly dug graves, some marked on headstones as children or with the names of women.

The Fallujah violence spilled over to the nearby western entrance of Baghdad, where gunmen shot down an American AH-64 Apache helicopter. As a team moved in to secure the bodies of the two dead crewmen, a large force of tanks and troops pushed down the highway outside the Iraqi capital, aiming to crush insurgents.

Gunmen have run rampant in the Abu Ghraib district west of Baghdad for three days, attacking fuel convoys, killing a U.S. soldier and two American civilians and kidnapping another American.

The captors of Thomas Hamill, an American who works for a U.S. contractor in Iraq, threatened to kill and burn him unless U.S. troops end their assault on Fallujah, west of Baghdad, by 6 a.m. Sunday. The deadline passed with no word on Hamill's fate.

The Arab TV station Al-Arabiya reported that insurgents kidnapped seven Chinese north of Fallujah on Sunday evening, citing Chinese diplomatic sources. No further details were immediately available.

Insurgents who kidnapped other foreigners this week began releasing some captives. A Briton was freed, and other kidnappers said they were freeing eight captives of various nationalities. Other insurgents who kidnapped two Japanese men and a woman said Saturday they would free their captives within 24 hours, but they had not been freed by Sunday night.

The U.S. military on Sunday reported 12 more U.S. soldiers killed in fighting on Friday and Saturday - half of them in Baghdad. The deaths brought to 59 the number of American soldier killed since the new fronts of violence erupted April 4. Nearly 900 Iraqis have been killed in the same period. At least 661 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq since the war began in March 2003.

Sporadic battles in Fallujah wounded two Marines, and the bodies of 11 Iraqis were brought to a mosque being used as a clinic. A Marine spokesman said troops responding to Iraqi fire killed ''a significant number'' of fighters. A Cobra helicopter fired rockets and missiles after it came under ground fire, he said.

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