However, Janabi, the insurgent leader, said Monday: "We still have our strength, our force and ammunition, and the battle is long, very long. And we will turn Iraq into one big Fallujah."
"It is only the beginning, from a military point of view," said Janabi, who heads the mujaheddin shura, an 18-member council of clerics, tribal sheiks and former Baath Party members that assumed control of the city of 250,000 shortly after Marines aborted their first attempt to capture it in April. "We have succeeded in drawing them into the quagmire of Fallujah, into the alleys and small pathways. They have fallen into the trap of explosive charges, land mines and, now, the defenders' short supply lines inside the neighborhoods."
Speaking in an undamaged house in the city's Nazal district, Janabi was protected by several bodyguards and wore an explosive vest, the wires that would detonate it dangling a few inches apart. A bodyguard said the cleric preferred martyrdom to "dying on his bed like a camel."
"The cause will not die if the individuals die," Janabi said. "It will survive until the last Iraqi holy warrior dies or runs out of bullets." He added, "If the military leaders agree on another area where we will inflict more losses on them, then we will."
Janabi mocked the statement of a senior Iraqi official who on Saturday told reporters that Janabi and another insurgent leader, Omar Hadid, were "cowards" who had fled the city before the offensive. Hadid is a ranking figure in the group now known as al Qaeda in Iraq, headed by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab Zarqawi, who by all accounts left Fallujah weeks before the U.S. offensive began on Nov. 8.
"I am here," Janabi said. "You can see me. And if you wait for a while, you can see Omar Hadid. He is still in the city."
The Iraqi government announced the capture of another insurgent leader, Moyad Ahmed Yaseen; news of his detention had been broadcast over a Marine public address system earlier in the day. Yaseen was military leader of the First Mohammed Army, the largest militia in Fallujah, which claimed a membership of 6,000 mostly Iraqi volunteers. In announcing the capture, Ayad Allawi, Iraq's interim prime minister, said the group "killed a number of Iraqis, Arabs and foreigners in Iraq by beheadings."
"We arrested the whole leadership," he said.
Fearful of a backlash, Allawi and other Iraqi officials have dismissed suggestions of a humanitarian crisis in Fallujah, where disputed reports of civilian casualties in April unleashed anger across Iraq. They have said most families fled the city before the American assault, an assertion confirmed by some residents. Most reporting in Fallujah is limited to journalists embedded with the U.S. military.
"The Iraqi government strongly rejects suggestions from some sources that there are shortages of supplies in Fallujah," a statement from Allawi's office said.
A spokesman, Thaer Naqib, said 12 trucks carrying food, water and medical supplies entered the city Tuesday under an escort of Iraqi troops.
But Amnesty International, in a release Tuesday, said the city still lacked water, electricity and organized means for evacuating the wounded. The Iraqi Red Crescent Society has been barred from delivering relief supplies, and doctors in Fallujah complained that U.S. troops were preventing them from moving in the city to treat wounded.
Wary of the role played by mosques and Islamic parties in the April uprisings, U.S. forces and the Iraqi government have cracked down on some religious activists, suggesting that they are abetting the insurgency. On Tuesday, U.S. forces detained Naseer Ayaef, a leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, in a pre-dawn raid on his home, said Ayad Samarrai, a spokesman for the party, which has taken part in the U.S.-led political process.
Staff writer Jackie Spinner in Fallujah and special correspondents Naseer Nouri and Bassam Sebti in Baghdad contributed to this report.
