holy hell they have the marines knocking at thier door sh-it I would not want to be in front of them ,I know marines they must be stupid, or ignorant, sheez, whats with these people, the corp will level the town, kill all that shoot at them, these guys are marines, and god almighty I sure would not want to face them, stupid arabs, they will win the day, marines are tough, I pity any one that goes against these guys, semper fi
Updated: 12:08 AM EDT
U.S. Warns Fallujah Insurgents Time Is Running Out
By LOURDES NAVARRO, AP
FALLUJAH, Iraq (April 22) - U.S. Marines warned guerrillas in this violence-wracked city Thursday that they have only days to hand over their heavy weapons or face a possible American attack. So far the insurgents have turned in mainly dud rockets, rusty mortar shells and grenades labeled ''inert.''
Lt. Gen. James Conway said the battle could be ''costly'' if Marines launch a new assault to uproot insurgents from Fallujah, saying foreign fighters in the city have been reinforcing their positions and have no interest in surrendering.
AP
U.S. Marines set up wire Thursday at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Fallujah.
The stark warning came two days after city leaders called on insurgents to hand over their heavy weapons in return for a U.S. pledge to hold back on plans to storm Fallujah and allow the return of families that fled the city.
Now Marines have halted the return of families because of the failure to disarm and the desire to have fewer civilians in the city if fighting resumes. More than a third of Fallujah's 200,000 people fled to Baghdad and elsewhere during the fighting that began April 5.
Early Thursday, Marines launched a major assault on the village of Karma, 10 miles northeast of Fallujah, in a second attempt to put down guerrillas there. ''The enemy is taking casualties; we are not,'' Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis said.
A battle in the village last week killed 100 insurgents, according to Marine commanders. The two days of fighting in palm groves and over canals was so intense that wounded Marines were sent out to fight.
In Baghdad, masked gunmen shot and killed a South African security contractor working for the U.S.-led occupation administration and severely wounded his translator Thursday, a U.S. spokesman said. The shooting took place near northern Baghdad's Sunni Muslim neighborhood of Azamiyah, where gunmen have been active.
The violence across Iraq has interrupted some infrastructure repairs and forced giant firms Siemens AG, Bechtel and General Electric to suspend some reconstruction projects, threatening to undermine the critical U.S. goal of rebuilding Iraq.
Even a U.S. government aid agency that oversees some reconstruction projects has been affected. Some 10 percent of its non-Iraqi employees are outside the country, either sent out of Iraq or unable to return because of the violence.
The upswing in violence has made April the bloodiest month for the American-led military since the invasion of Iraq. At least 100 soldiers and five American civilian contractors have been killed. Dozens of foreigners have been abducted in a wave of kidnappings, with about 15 still captive.
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New figures for the Iraqi casualty toll from this month's fighting emerged Thursday, with the health minister saying 576 Iraqi insurgents and civilians died in fighting since April 1 - sharply lower than earlier estimates.
A spokesman for British forces responsible for the southern Iraqi city of Basra lowered the reported death toll to 50 from a series of suicide bombings that targeted police stations there Wednesday.
It was still too early to say who was behind the Basra attacks, Capt. Hisham Halawi said. ''We can't discount al-Qaida, we can't discount former regime loyalists,'' he said.
Basra is overwhelmingly Shiite, and the last major suicide attack also targeted Shiites: a series of suicide bombers who struck holy shrines in Karbala and Baghdad on March 2. At least 181 people were killed.
U.S. officials blamed the Karbala and Baghdad bombings - and other suicide bombings that have killed civilians - on foreign Islamic militants. They say a Jordanian al-Qaida linked militant, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, is leading a campaign of terror attacks against Shiites aimed at sparking a Shiite-Sunni civil war.
But despite Washington's claims that Iraq is a the center of the war on terror, the level of foreign militant activity in Iraq has remained unclear.
Out of 2,000 suspected insurgents being held by the U.S. military, only about 50 are foreigners, and U.S. officials have provided no detailed evidence of where the fighters are from or how many there are.
On Thursday, Conway said ''hundreds'' of foreign fighters are holed up in Fallujah - the highest estimate reported by U.S. officials.
''They have been the catalyst for a vast majority of what has happened in Anbar province,'' the western region where Fallujah is located, he said.
Some U.S. coalition officials in Baghdad have said al-Zarqawi may be in Fallujah. But a U.S. counterterrorism official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Thursday, ''To what extent, if any, he is involved in Fallujah fighting is unclear.''
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Conway warned that Marines' patience was wearing thin with the weapons handover. Fallujah's residents have ''days, not weeks'' to carry out the provision, he said.
The vast majority of weapons turned in Wednesday and Thursday were ''junk,'' commanders said.
Among them were 20 RPG rounds - 12 of them training rounds marked as ''inert;'' seven RPG launchers, two of them unusable; four ''dud'' rockets that had already been fired but failed to explode; 100 mortar rounds, all heavily rusted; and four medium machine guns, all unusable, said Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne.
''It was junk, things I wouldn't ask my Marines to begin to fire,'' Conway said. ''We were not pleased at all with the turn-in we saw yesterday.''
''We are somewhat questioning whether (the Fallujah negotiators) represent the people of Fallujah,'' he said.
The compilation of Iraqi deaths by Health Minister Khudayer Abbas since April 1 was sharply lower than a U.S. military estimate of about 1,000 insurgents killed and about half The Associated Press tally of 1,170 killed based on statements from hospital officials, police and the U.S. military.
Abbas said 271 Iraqis had been killed in Fallujah since the Marine siege began on April 5. Doctors in the city had given a higher figure of 600 killed, Abbas said, because they had been pressured to do so by insurgents for political reasons.
The minister said he did not know how many were civilians. An official in the ministry, speaking on condition of anonymity, said 19 percent of the dead were women and children.
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This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine
Ya know, the whiney bastages that are against nukes really don't understand that a nuke would be more humane than a battalion of Marines. The ragheads had better learn the term BOHICA!
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The Second Amendment, it ain't about DUCK HUNTING!
I feel more like I do now that I did when I first got here!
Just one question... 
When is the lillie livered gummint going to deal with the problem?
I'm with you Max, nuke them!
