US and Iraqi forces yesterday declared victory in Samarra, the first step of a drive to take back all of Iraq?s rebel-held areas before elections due in January.

While aid organisations coped with the aftermath in the city north of Baghdad, a hospital received the unidentified corpses of a beheaded man and a shot woman, both believed to be Westerners, found by police south of the capital.

Around 3 000 US troops and 2 000 Iraqi soldiers stormed Samarra, 100 km north of Baghdad, on Friday, determined to rid the city of an estimated 1 000 insurgents.

?This has been a successful operation ... We?re very confident that the future of Samarra is good,? Major-General John Batiste, the commander of the US 1st Infantry Division, which led the assault on Samarra, told CNN. ?It is over in Samarra,? Iraqi Defence Minister Hazem Shaalan told Al Arabiya television.

In 36 hours of fighting, the US military said it killed 125 guerrillas and seized 88. Residents said many bodies were left lying in the roads, untended due to the fear of snipers. Hospital staff were overwhelmed with bodies and wounded.

While the city was calm yesterday, a Reuters photographer saw the skeletons of several burnt out cars and pools of dried blood on street corners, the bodies only recently collected.

Aid organisations voiced concern about a lack of water and electricity in the city and the fate of hundreds of families forced to flee the offensive.

The Iraqi Red Crescent Society, the Muslim equivalent of the Red Cross, said it was trying to deliver food, water and first aid to civilians. It was especially concerned about the welfare of 500 families who fled to areas north of Samarra.

Firdoos al-Ubadi, a spokeswoman for the Iraqi Red Crescent, said her group and other aid organisations had received a letter from Iraq?s Human Rights Ministry describing the situation in Samarra as a tragedy and calling for emergency assistance.

The Human Rights Ministry was not immediately available to confirm the letter. Iraq?s interior minister, who visited Samarra on Saturday, said no civilians had been killed in the day-and-a-half blitz, a statement that caused anger among some residents who said they lost family members, including children, in the fighting.

The US military said it had tried to keep civilian casualties to a minimum but said there was always a cost.

Which stronghold next?

About 70 percent of the city was under US-Iraqi control, but operations were still going on, said a spokesman for the US 1st Infantry Division. A dusk-to-dawn curfew remained in place, but many residents ventured outdoors yesterday.

The US military had estimated that about 1 000 guerrillas were hiding out in Samarra, but after the onslaught, it was not clear what had happened to most of those fighters.

In previous attacks on rebel strongholds, insurgents have melted back into the population, giving up the ground to US troops, only to return days later and resume fighting. It was not clear if a similar scenario could play out in Samarra.

The US military has vowed to take back all rebel strongholds before the end of the year, ahead of elections due in January. After Samarra, the fight is expected to get tougher.

Two larger and more rebellious cities west of Baghdad, Falluja and Ramadi, will also have to be wrested back from insurgent hands, and there are areas of the capital, including the Shi?ite slum of Sadr City, that would need to be retaken.

US warplanes bombed Falluja yesterday, the latest in a weeks-long campaign of strikes targeted at Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his followers.

In a statement, the US military described the raid as ?another precision strike?, this time against a building where 10-15 ?anti-Iraqi forces? were moving weapons.

A hospital official said the attack killed two civilians and wounded 10. Many Falluja residents accuse the United States of bombing indiscriminately and say many of those killed in the air strikes are civilians, not insurgents or foreign fighters.

Antipathy towards US troops, and Washington?s policy in Iraq in general, is strong in Falluja, and the city of around 250 000 is expected to present a severe challenge to any attempt by US troops and Iraqi forces to overrun it.

As well as subduing and taking back control of rebel areas, Iraq?s US-backed interim government is battling to suppress a kidnapping crisis in which around 140 foreigners and hundreds more Iraqis have been abducted over the past six months.

Around 30 of those foreigners have been killed, several by beheading, and at least three Westerners are still being held ? two French journalists and a British engineer.

A Kuwaiti newspaper which last week correctly reported that two Italian aid workers would be freed by their captors has said talks are under way to release the Briton, 62-year-old Kenneth Bigley, although the British government has said nothing.

Sabah al-Bazee