IRAQ: UPRISING

Aljazeera: Plea to lift siege as Falluja toll mounts


Doctors in Falluja want the siege on the town lifted for shifting patients with serious injuries even as brutal street battles rage.

Two hundred and eighty people have been killed since the start of the siege and 400 more injured, said Tahr al-Issawi, the director of Falluja's hospital on Thursday.

"We also know of dead and wounded in various places buried under rubble, but we cannot reach them because of the fighting," he said.

Clinics in the town, 65km west of Baghdad, are struggling to treat victims of the US attacks, said Aljazeera's correspondent Ahmad Mansur.

US helicopters and snipers are firing on ambulances and civilian vehicles trying to take the wounded to clinics or the hospital, the correspondent said