The US-Iraqi military campaign on Iraq's once rebel-held city of Fallujah, which claimed the lives of over 50 US troops, is a double-edged sword for the exhausted US forces busy with putting down the nationwide rebellion, said analysts.

Although many people had expected the all-out assault on Fallujah would take no more than three days, it proved to be lengthy.

More than two weeks have passed without any official announcement of victory for the US Marines in Fallujah, a small town with a population of about 350,000, most of whom had fled their homes for life.

Despite a quick recapture of the city, about 20,000 US troops were locked in the street battles as they swept the pockets of insurgents who were taking positions behind roadblocks or on rooftops to fight to the last.

Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, the top terror master in Iraq and a major pretext of the offensive, was said to have fled the city, some 50 km west of Baghdad, along with other rebel group leaders.

Some said the United States was risking its prestige in a battle of unknown results even if the Americans managed to destroy the rebels' hideouts in the city.

The fighting had done great damages to Fallujah as well as to the Americans and their credibility, said the analysts, adding that whether the Americans succeeded or failed to uproot the rebels in the city, the results would not be in their best interests and might even endanger the US scheme to establish a government loyal to the West and to Washington in particular.

There were signs that the insurgency had spread all over the country when Fallujah, dubbed "capital of resistance", was setting itself up as an example in the fighting against the US occupation and people of Fallujah were seen as martyrs by many Iraqis.

Quite a few prominent Muslim clerics in Iraq and its neighboring countries have called for Intifada to punish the invaders who crossed thousands of kilometers to occupy Iraq.

"All what the Americans claimed to be terrorism roots in the occupation," said the Muslim Scholars Association, a revered Sunni religious body.

The association has formed an alliance of around 60 parties and movements to boycott the general elections due in January next year.

It has provided an alternative election scheme that requires a complete US withdrawal from cities and invites the United Nations to supervise the elections.

The elections, which will generate a transitional parliament and a new government, are considered by the US officials as a landmark of the process to bring democracy to Iraq.

Restoring democracy to Iraq was one of the pretexts with which the United States launched the war on Iraq last year as other proclaimed reasons for mounting the war had been proved ungrounded.

"The occupying forces are shedding the blood of Iraqis and destroying their houses in order to restore democracy to the country, which is ironic, for it will only have opposite results as the resistance to the general elections grow stronger," said Mahmoud Hussein, a schoolteacher in Baghdad.

Iraqi observers said Washington would insist on holding the elections on time even in the absence of the opposition parties which might further stoke more resistance in the violence-battered country.

Source: Xinhua