RAMADI, Iraq, 29 October 2004 — At least two Iraqis were killed and eight people wounded, including three US marines, in clashes yesterday between rebels and US troops in the restive Iraqi city of Ramadi, hospital and military sources said.

Violence also flared elsewhere, with bomb blasts and a rocket attack leaving two US soldiers and at least five Iraqis dead. The attacks came as the Al-Qaeda-linked Army of Ansar Al-Sunna said it has executed 11 kidnapped members of the Iraqi National Guard in a statement posted on its website along with photographs.

Iraqi security forces and US-led troops are a daily target in the violence that has plagued the country in the aftermath of last year’s invasion to topple Saddam Hussein.

Militants piled more pressure on Washington’s military allies in Iraq yesterday, seizing a Polish woman and holding a Japanese man under threat of death. With a British-Iraqi aid worker already in captivity, Iraq’s hostage crisis has intensified amid growing expectations of a US offensive on the rebel cities of Fallujah and Ramadi.

Al-Jazeera television showed a video of a woman seated between two masked men, one pointing a gun to her head. A hitherto unknown Islamist group said the woman was a Pole working for US forces in Iraq and demanded the withdrawal of Polish troops and the release of Iraqi women prisoners.

The mother of the Japanese hostage facing a threat of execution by an extremist group in Iraq went on television yesterday to plead for his release hours before the expiry of a deadline set by the captors. “I heard some saying that he helps the (Japanese) army, but I assure you that he has nothing to do with all this,” Setsuko Koda, mother of 24-year-old Shosei Koda, said in a message she read on Al-Jazeera satellite news channel.

“He only wanted to see for himself what is happening in Iraq and do what he can to help the beleaguered Iraqis,” she said, according to an Arabic translation. The Al-Qaeda-linked group threatened in a video posted on the Internet on Tuesday to execute him if Japan does not pull its 600 troops out of Iraq within 48 hours. Tokyo has rejected the ultimatum. A threat to behead the Japanese hostage was set to expire later yesterday after Tokyo rejected the demands of the group.

Meanwhile, the relief agency CARE International, which employed kidnapped Briton Margaret Hassan as its Iraq director said it had closed down all operations in Iraq. “CARE has closed down all operations in Iraq,” it said in a statement issued in Amman. “Please release Mrs. Hassan to her family and friends in Iraq.”

The fighting in Ramadi, some 100 kilometers west of the capital, erupted after Marines sealed off a section of the city to conduct a predawn search of houses for bomb-making equipment, said Capt. Sean Kuehl. “Two to three enemy died,” he told AFP, noting that three US Marines were wounded in the battles that crackled into the morning, and which an AFP reporter said flared in the centre and the west of the city. US troops came under fire around Baghdad and Mosul. A US soldier and at least one Iraqi civilian were killed and two soldiers wounded when a bomb hit a military patrol in southern Baghdad, the army said.