Naseer Al-Nahr, Arab News

BAGHDAD, 12 April 2004 — A US Apache helicopter was downed during fighting in western Baghdad yesterday and its two crewmembers killed, and shootings that wounded two Americans shook a fragile truce between resistance fighters and US Marines in the besieged city of Fallujah.

Smoke rose on Baghdad’s western edge where the AH-64 Apache helicopter was shot down by ground fire in the morning. More helicopters circled overhead while US troops closed off the main highway — a key supply route into the capital.

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt told a news briefing that the two-member crew was killed and a quick-reaction team was collecting the bodies.

Heavy firing was heard, and tanks and Humvees moved into the area near the suburb of Abu Gharib, where masked gunmen have wreaked havoc for the past three days, attacking fuel convoys and blowing up tanker trucks. On Friday resistance fighters kidnapped an American civilian and killed a US soldier in the area.

President George W. Bush, attending an Easter service at the US Army base Fort Hood, Texas, warned the country yesterday of the possibility of more American casualties in Iraq while saying the US-led mission was just.

The captors of Thomas Hamill, a Mississippi native who works for a US contractor in Iraq, threatened to kill and burn him unless US troops end their assault on Fallujah, west of Baghdad, by 6 a.m. yesterday, but the deadline passed with no word on Hamill’s fate.

Video footage aired on Arabic television yesterday showed the bodies of two dead Westerners — possibly a pair of Americans seen by APTN cameramen on Friday being dragged out of a car on the Abu Gharib highway in a separate incident.

The video showed the bodies surrounded by gunmen, who say the two were American intelligence officers. One of the bodies lay sprawled on the pavement, his face bloodied and his right leg drenched in blood. The other body’s shirt was lifted to reveal a bullet hole in his back. Both wore dark T-shirts and khaki pants often worn by private contractors.

Britain’s Foreign Office said Gary Teeley, a British man who had reportedly been kidnapped in the southern city of Nassiriyah, is safe and in the hands of coalition forces.

Fallujah saw occasional sniper fire yesterday but was the quietest it has been all week. Sunni fighters and Marines had agreed to a 12-hour cease-fire that started early yesterday amid talks between Iraqi officials on how to end the violence.

More than 600 Iraqis have been killed in Fallujah since fighting began early Monday, the head of the city’s hospital said. Rafie Al-Issawi said the actual number may be higher because there were reports of people being buried at home. At least five Marines have died in the fighting.

Members of the Iraqi Governing Council were holding a second day of negotiations with city representatives in an attempt to win the handover of Iraqis who killed and mutilated four private American security contractors on March 31 and of other fighters.

Hundreds of US reinforcements moved in place on the city edge, joining 1,200 Marines and nearly 900 Iraqi security forces already involved in the fighting.

The most serious break in yesterday’s peace came when a sniper opened fire on a US patrol, wounding two Marines, commanders said. In the ensuing gunbattle at least one fighter was killed.

“They are not playing by the rules, sir,” Marine Capt. Jason Smith radioed to his commander after taking fire in another incident. “At the moment we’re just trying to get the cease-fire in place,” Paul Bremer, the top US civilian administrator in Iraq, told ABC’s “This Week.”

“What were trying to do is simply get the forces to stop firing.”

About a third of the city’s population of 200,000 fled Friday and Saturday, though Marines turned back any military-age men trying to leave, said Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne, commander of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment.

“Families are holed up in houses. They have been told to stay inside. But they are running out of water and food,” said Marine Capt. Jason Smith, 30.

In fighting across the country since April 4 — including in Fallujah and in the uprising by the militia of Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr in the south — nearly 900 Iraqis and 47 American soldiers have been killed. At least 649 US soldiers have died in Iraq since the war began in March 2003.

In other incidents, gunmen ambushed Iraqi police before dawn in the northern city of Kirkuk, sparking a battle joined by US troops. Four attackers were killed, said Iraqi Col. Sarhad Qadir.

In Mosul, fighters attacked two Iraqi police patrols in skirmishes that killed two Iraqi police, a gunman and two passers-by, according to the hospital.

In Baghdad’s Sunni neighborhood of Al-Azamiyah armed men clashed with US soldiers. Four Iraqis were killed.

— Additional input from agencies