Naseer Al-Nahr, Arab News

BAGHDAD, 30 April 2004 — American warplanes pounded Fallujah for the third night yesterday even as US Marines negotiated a “tentative” agreement to pull back forces from the besieged city in a deal that would allow an Iraqi force led by a former Saddam Hussein-era general to keep the peace there.

In another day of bloody violence elsewhere, 10 US soldiers and a South African civilian were killed in attacks, including eight soldiers who died when hit by a bomb as they tried to clear explosives from a road south of Baghdad.

US military commanders met with former Iraqi generals to hammer out the final details of a Fallujah agreement, Marine Capt. James Edge said. Marine commanders and the Pentagon earlier said a deal was reached, but later said it was not final and that fine points still needed to be worked out.

Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita said that it remains a US goal of the talks to win assurances that the fighters will turn over those responsible for the March 31 killing and mutilation of the four American contract workers in Fallujah.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said there was no deal yet and officials were “still working on it.”

Within hours of Marine officers and Fallujah’s police chief saying troops were pulling back from some siege positions around the Sunni bastion west of Baghdad, US warplanes again pounded districts where as many as 2,000 fighters are holed up.

As darkness fell, gunfire crackled across streets where ambulances raced to the scene of the bombings. Doctors say about 600 people have been killed since Marines encircled the city at the beginning of April.

In an apparent gesture to help the Fallujah negotiations, US authorities yesterday released the imam of the city’s main mosque, Sheikh Jamal Shaker Nazzal, an outspoken opponent of the US occupation who was arrested in October.

The tentative deal outlined a surprising new way to find an “Iraqi solution to an Iraqi problem,” in the words of Marine Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne: creation of an entirely new military force of some 1,100 members, named the Fallujah Protection Army.

The force, which will replace the Marine cordon and move into the city as US troops pull back, will be led by a leading general from Saddam’s army and made up of Iraqis with “military experience” from the Fallujah region, Byrne said.

Previous deals in Fallujah, notably a cease-fire two weeks ago, have broken down and US airstrikes this week and tough talk by US President George W. Bush seemed to herald a possible all-out assault. The Pentagon said it had sent more tanks to Fallujah and other restive areas around Baghdad.

US soldiers fired on a minibus full of civilians near a checkpoint on the outskirts of the besieged town, setting the vehicle on fire. Iraqi policeman Fouad Al-Hamdani said four Iraqis were killed when US troops opened fire on the minibus as it headed toward the town through an area where clashes had broken out between the troops and fighters.

The eight US soldiers were killed when their team from the 1st Armored Division was attacked while removing roadside bombs from a key highway, near the town of Mahmudiyah, south of the capital, the military said in a statement.

A driver in a station wagon neared the team then “detonated an explosive device,” the statement said.

Earlier yesterday, another US soldier from the Texas-based 1st Cavalry Division was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade attack on his patrol in eastern Baghdad, the military said.

A US soldier was killed and another wounded when a roadside bomb exploded near their convoy outside the city of Baqouba, 40 km, (24 miles) north of the capital, the military said.

Meanwhile, gunmen attacked a car in the southern city of Basra, killing a South African, the fifth citizen of that country to die in Iraq.

The American deaths raise to 126 the number of US troops killed in combat in April, the bloodiest month for US forces in Iraq.

At least 736 US troops have died in Iraq since the war began in March 2003. Up to 1,200 Iraqis have been killed this month.

With only two months left before the planned return of sovereignty to the Iraqis, a tense standoff also continued outside the southern city of Najaf where Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr has been holed up.