By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, December 12, 2004; Page A32

BAGHDAD, Dec. 11 -- A series of car bombings, ambushes and assassinations across the country's most restive regions Saturday killed several civilians, police and clerics. An insurgent leader said a day earlier that fighting in the western Iraqi city of Fallujah had drawn hundreds of fighters to rebel ranks.

The leader, Abdullah Janabi, 53, a Sunni Muslim cleric from Fallujah who has eluded a dragnet by the U.S. military, vowed Friday in an interview that the fighting in the devastated city on the Euphrates River would continue for months.

"In one day, we received 400 Iraqis and Arabs," he said from a village near Fallujah. U.S. soldiers, he said, "crossed the ocean obligated to fight people who want to die, while they still love life."

Before the U.S. military assault on Fallujah, Janabi headed the Shura Council of Mujaheddin, an 18-member group of clerics, tribal sheiks and former Baath Party members who assumed control of the city of 250,000 shortly after Marines aborted their first attempt to capture it in April. The U.S. military retook Fallujah last month, destroying large parts of it and ending its role as a redoubt of insurgent fighters, although sporadic clashes continue in the city.

Janabi was one of three insurgent leaders who worked out of Fallujah. The others were Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab Zarqawi and Omar Hadid, an Iraqi who headed the local branch of Zarqawi's organization. Last week in Fallujah, insurgents reported that Hadid's left arm had been amputated after he was wounded in the shoulder. Rumors circulated through Fallujah and nearby towns that he had been killed.

The U.S. military also received reports that Hadid may have been injured, according to Col. Jenny Holbert, a Marine spokeswoman.

Janabi insisted that Hadid was still operating in the region.

"Omar Hadid is not dead," said Janabi, wearing a T-shirt, jeans and a checkered headscarf. As in a previous interview last month, he had a belt of explosives around his waist. "He is fighting with his men."

Fighting has persisted in the corridor of towns from Fallujah west along the Euphrates in Anbar province. The military said a U.S. Marine was killed in fighting there Saturday but provided no details.

The clashes have been particularly fierce in Ramadi, 60 miles west of Baghdad. On Saturday, the Marines said insurgents ambushed them a day earlier, firing rocket-propelled grenades and small arms from the city's hospital and medical college. The Marines returned fire and suffered no casualties, a statement said.

Muthana Assafi, the hospital director, denied there was firing from the hospital building but said insurgents could have operated from the facility's sprawling grounds.

"If there are some fighters who use this place to launch mortars or attack the U.S. forces, we wouldn't know about them," he said.

News agencies reported clashes in Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, which has become one of the country's most restive locales. A car bomb wounded eight U.S. soldiers, and a U.S. warplane dropped a 500-pound bomb on an insurgent position.

In the western town of Hit, along the Euphrates River, gunmen ambushed a minibus carrying members of the Iraqi National Guard, killing seven of them.

Near Kirkuk, a combustible and ethnically divided city with Arab, Kurdish and Turkmen populations, a car bomb wounded two U.S. soldiers and an interpreter.

A suspected suicide car bomber wounded two U.S. soldiers in Baiji, and two more were wounded by a roadside bomb outside Hawija, near Kirkuk, the Associated Press reported.

In addition to car bombings and ambushes, insurgents have targeted Iraqis cooperating with the U.S. military, in particular members of security forces. In the southern Baghdad neighborhood of Saidiya, assailants attacked a car carrying an Interior Ministry official, killing him, said Col. Adnan Abdel-Rahman, a ministry spokesman.

Two Shiite Muslims clerics were killed, the latest in a series of shadowy assassinations of religious leaders in the capital and elsewhere.

In Baghdad, Salim Yaqoubi was killed by gunmen near his house early Saturday, residents said. Another cleric, Ali Jabouri, was killed on Friday near Mahmudiyah, 15 miles south of Baghdad in a region dubbed by Iraqis as the Triangle of Death. Jabouri was formerly a representative of Moqtada Sadr, a young militant cleric whose followers rose up twice against U.S. forces this year.

Also Saturday, a U.S. soldier was sentenced to three years in prison for killing a severely wounded Iraqi teenager, the military said. Staff Sgt. Johnny M. Horne Jr., 30, of Wilson, N.C., pleaded guilty on Friday to one count of unpremeditated murder and one count of soliciting another soldier to commit unpremeditated murder.

Special correspondents Omar Fekeiki and Bassam Sebti and Saad Sarhan in Najaf contributed to this report.