10 Marines Killed in Fallujah Blast

"It seems we lose someone every week who is killed by the Americans for wrong reasons," said Fawzi Muhammed, the deputy chairman of the city's reconstruction committee, who said his cousin was shot dead by U.S. soldiers this year while standing in front of his home.

"Many things are not good," he added, "but I think compared to all of the cities in Anbar, Fallujah is the safest and the best."

After the offensive last year, much of the city lay in ruins.

"It was like an earthquake," said Farouk Abd-Muhammed, a local engineer who is running for a national assembly seat on Dec. 15. "After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was Fallujah."

The Iraqi government authorized $105 million to rebuild houses damaged in the fighting. Nearly all of that money has now been dispersed, an amount representing about 40 percent of the assessed value of the damaged properties, the State Department representative said.

A drive this week along the city's main thoroughfares showed some new buildings and others that were still bombed-out shells or pocked with bullet holes.

In Washington on Friday, Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said he believed the Marines killed and injured in Fallujah on Thursday were in a location they thought was "perfectly safe" when they were hit.

"The magnitude of the ordnance is awesome. Probably four very large shells were linked together and exploded," Warner said at a Capitol Hill news conference.

Warner said the issue of improvised explosive devices, the military's term for roadside bombs, was of paramount importance to U.S. leaders because insurgents have been able to use them so effectively. Many of the bombs include large, unexploded artillery shells, which when wired together produce enormous blasts.

"There's no question before the Pentagon today, or the American public, of greater seriousness than the lethality of this particular type of weaponry," Warner said.

Elsewhere in Iraq on Friday, U.S. and Iraqi troops continued to wage separate offensives in Ramadi and in Hit, another Anbar city. They are the latest in a string of counterinsurgency operations conducted in the province, which commanders have described as a haven for foreign fighters entering Iraq from Syria.

A soldier assigned to the 2nd Marine Division died of his wounds after his vehicle was hit by a rocket Thursday during combat operations in Ramadi, the military said in a statement.

In a separate statement, the military said three soldiers from the Georgia National Guard's 48th Brigade Combat Team died in a vehicle accident near Ali Air Base in southeastern Iraq.

Special correspondent Shammari reported from Udhaim. Staff writers William Branigin and Josh White in Washington contributed to this report.