BAGHDAD, 27 March 2004 — Iraqi guerrillas fought running battles with US forces in Fallujah yesterday and a television cameraman was among nine people killed. Three of the dead were children.

Issam Mohammed, a doctor at Fallujah’s main hospital, said 25 people were injured.

Journalists covering the clashes said a cameraman working for a foreign news organization had been shot. Doctors at the hospital said he died from his wounds.

Several explosions, apparently from mortar bombs fired by guerrillas, echoed through the streets, which were deserted apart from ambulances and US military vehicles.

A mosque loudspeaker gave the call to Friday prayer, but residents stayed home.

Residents said US troops had come under attack when they entered the town’s Al-Askari neighborhood to conduct house-to-house searches. Soldiers carried out a similar operation in the Al-Shuhada district.

US troops turned back reporters trying to reach the town, where explosions and heavy gunfire could be heard from the outskirts.

Fallujah, about 60 km west of Baghdad, is known for its fierce hostility to the US-led occupation.

Insurgents also targeted the country’s oil industry. On Wednesday night, the rebels detonated explosives on an oil well in northern Iraq sparking a fire that raged for 24 hours before being extinguished, a senior Iraqi security officer said.

The blast in the Northern Oil Company well in the Khabaz area, about 90 km (55 miles) west of Kirkuk, occurred Wednesday night, said Gen. Mohammed Amin, the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps chief in Kirkuk.

The fire was extinguished late Thursday.

The well was not being tapped at the time of the blast and was not closely guarded, he said.

“This is a terrorist act. This is the first time an oil well has come under attack in Kirkuk,” Amin said.

In the south, a pipeline in the southern Basra oil facilities was on fire, an official from Iraq’s State Oil Marketing Organization said. Crude exports from the region were not affected, he said.