16 U.S. soldiers killed as forces push into Fallujah

NEAR FALLUJAH, Iraq -- U.S. forces punched into the center of Fallujah on Tuesday, overwhelming bands of guerrillas in the street with heavy barrages of fire and searching house to house in a powerful advance on the second day of a major offensive to retake the insurgent stronghold.\nAt least 16 Americans have been killed in the past two days across Iraq, the military said -- including three killed in Fallujah combat on Tuesday, two killed by mortars near the northern city of Mosul and 11 others who died Monday, most of them as guerrillas launched a wave of attacks in Baghdad and southwest of Fallujah.\nThe 11 deaths were the highest one-day U.S. toll in more than six months.\nLt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, commander of multinational forces in Iraq, predicted "several more days of tough urban fighting." He said insurgents were "fighting hard, but not to the death. They are falling back," adding that the U.S. advance was progressing "ahead of schedule."\nMetz put the number of U.S. casualties in the operation at around "a dozen," but would not give an exact number or say if the estimate included wounded. He said he believed there were "very few" civilian casualties and that insurgents suffered "significantly more" casualties than expected.\nAnger grew among Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority over the assault on Fallujah, a mainly Sunni city. A religious leader pleaded with Prime Minister Ayad Allawi personally to call a brief halt to fighting, a Sunni party quit his Cabinet.\nThe vote is being held "over the corpses of those killed in Fallujah," said Harith al-Dhari, director of the Association of Muslim Scholars.\nIf Sunnis refuse to vote on a large scale, it could wreck the legitimacy of the election, seen as vital in Iraq's move to democracy.\nInsurgents appeared to be trying to open up new fronts away from Fallujah. Prime Minister Ayad Allawi declared a nighttime curfew in Baghdad a day after a string of insurgent attacks in the city killed nine Iraqis and wounded more than 80.\nSeveral heavy explosions hit central Baghdad Tuesday after nightfall, followed by the rattle of small arms fire. Baghdad's international airport was closed to military traffic after a missile was fired at a C130 transport plane. The plane escaped by dropping chaff that diverted the missile.\nArmed insurgents, some of them masked, swarmed in the center of two other Sunni strongholds -- Ramadi and Hit. Clashes occurred in Mosul, the major city of northern Iraq, and north of Haditha on the road to the Syrian border.\nAn estimated 6,000 U.S. troops and 2,000 allied Iraqi soldiers invaded Fallujah from the north Monday night in a swift start to an offensive aimed at re-establishing government control ahead of the elections. The guerrillas fought off a bloody Marine offensive against the city in April.\nMetz said the initial assault broke the "outer crust" of insurgent resistance, and now fighters had split up into small groups for running battles.\nOn Tuesday, heavy street clashes were raging in Fallujah's northern neighborhoods. By midday, U.S. armored units had made their way to the highway running east-west through the city's center and crossed over into southern Fallujah, a major milestone.\nSmall bands of gunmen were engaging U.S. troops, then falling back in the face of overwhelming fire from American tanks, 20mm cannons and heavy machine guns, said Time magazine reporter Michael Ware, embedded with troops. Ware reported that there appeared to be no civilians in the area he was in.\nOn one thoroughfare in the city, U.S. troops traded fire with gunmen holed up in a row of houses about 100 yards away. An American gunner on an armored vehicle let loose with his machine gun, grinding the upper part of a small building to rubble.\nWitnesses reported seeing at least two American tanks engulfed in flames. A Kiowa helicopter flying over southeast Fallujah took groundfire, injuring the pilot, but he managed to return to the U.S. base.\nA major first objective was a mosque about a half-mile in from the city's northern edge that the military said was being used as an arms depot. U.S. troops surrounded the site while Iraqi forces entered the mosque, the BBC reported.