BAGHDAD, Nov. 16 -- U.S. and Iraqi troops entered Mosul in force Tuesday to retake streets and police stations seized by fighters in the northern city last week, while a prominent Iraqi insurgent claimed that the battle in Fallujah was only the beginning of an uprising that has already roiled parts of Iraq dominated by Sunni Muslims.
"The Americans have opened the gates of hell," Abdullah Janabi said Monday in Fallujah, a city U.S. commanders have said they now control after a week of often fierce fighting. "The battle of Fallujah is the beginning of other battles."
Iraqi officials had said they believed Janabi, a 53-year-old Sunni cleric, had fled the city before U.S. troops pushed into the insurgent stronghold. But he spoke from the city's southern section, at times boasting of losses inflicted on U.S. troops and at other times insisting that other insurgent leaders remained in Fallujah with him.
After fighting erupted in Fallujah last week, insurgents moved to open a second front in Mosul, seizing control of parts of the city and attacking bridges and six police stations. Some stations were looted of body armor, uniforms, weapons and radios, and at least three were too damaged to be reoccupied.
On Tuesday, more than 2,500 U.S. troops entered Mosul, where gunfire echoed through rain-soaked streets that were largely deserted on the last day of a three-day Muslim holiday. The city's five bridges across the Tigris River were closed, and a curfew was imposed from 4 p.m. to 6 a.m. The troops met little resistance, although four U.S. soldiers were wounded by a car bomb that detonated near their convoy on the city's western edge, said Lt. Col. Paul Hastings, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Mosul.
When the fighting first flared in Mosul, many members of the city's 5,000-man police force fled, and the police chief, Brig. Gen. Mohammed Kheiri Barhawi, was fired following complaints that some officers had cooperated with the insurgents. Hastings said about 1,000 policemen had returned, but he acknowledged that reconstituting the units posed a "huge challenge."
The clashes that have erupted north and west of Baghdad since last week constitute the most intense fighting since the insurgency began in earnest six months ago. The U.S. military has reported 130 to 140 attacks a day, including car bombings, roadside mine blasts and ambushes, along with sabotage and intimidation of Iraqi security forces. On Monday, when fighting broke out in several northern and western cities, seven car bombs were detonated -- two in Mosul and five in the region around Fallujah.
The daily tally is comparable to that seen in a bout of fighting in Fallujah and southern Iraq in April, but across a far smaller area.
Residents reported renewed fighting Tuesday in the northern towns of Baiji and Baqubah. In Balad, about 40 miles north of Baghdad, an improvised mine detonated near a convoy, killing a U.S. soldier and injuring another, the military said.
Since declaring Fallujah liberated on Sunday, U.S. commanders have played down the continuing battles there, but bursts of gun and mortar fire exploded Tuesday across the battle-scarred city as American forces continued to pursue insurgents. Shooting could be heard for most of the afternoon on the city's northern edge, where the U.S. military estimated about 100 fighters were still operating in neighborhoods that troops first entered a week ago.
Organized bands of fighters clashed with U.S. troops Tuesday on Fallujah's southern outskirts. Black smoke rose from burning rubble after U.S. artillery batteries fired 155mm rounds into suspected insurgent hideouts.
The U.S. military said it had killed at least 1,200 insurgents and detained hundreds in fighting that has destroyed scores of buildings in the conservative, deeply religious city. At least 38 U.S. troops and six Iraqi soldiers have been killed, the most in a single offensive since the fall of Saddam Hussein on April 9, 2003.
"I think it was a very substantial victory," Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the U.S. military commander in Iraq, said after touring Fallujah on Tuesday.
"Fallujah is no longer a terrorist safe haven," Casey said. "That's a major accomplishment with the Iraqi security forces and for the coalition forces, and it's a major way ahead for Iraq."
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