US aircraft pounded the insurgent enclave of Fallujah on Saturday, killing seven Iraqis in a raid the military said targeted a hideout of a militant group, as two British Muslim leaders arrived in Baghdad in a bid to save the life of a British hostage. Residents said a another strike on the town was underway later.
Another seven Iraqis - national guard recruits - died in a rebel attack near the capital, Baghdad, while a roadside bomb killed a US soldier in the area, bringing to five the number of US troops killed in 48 hours, the military said.
In New York, visiting Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi pledged that Iraq's own forces would secure the country in time for January elections to be held.
In the shadowy and bloody battle involving foreign hostages, Britain sent a delegation from the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) to seek the release of engineer Kenneth Bigley, threatened with the same death, by beheading, meted out earlier this week to two Americans kidnapped with him.
Bigley, 62, and the Americans were seized from their Baghdad home this month by the Unity and Holy War group of alleged al Qaeda operative Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi.
A web posting claimed on Saturday that he had been executed but the British authorities dismissed the statement.
Daud Abdullah and Musharraf Hussain of the MCB arrived in Baghdad late Saturday and said they would hold talks with religious and civic leaders and some politicians and try to make contact with Bigley's kidnappers.
"As Muslim brothers to these captors ... we want to give the message that our religion is one of compassion, of love, of non-violence and we want to see Iraq as a free and democratic, successful, happy and prosperous nation," Hussain told reporters.
"That can only happen through non-violence, which is the way of the Muslim and our duty is to remind these Muslim brothers that that is what we should be doing."
The engineer's family continued to issue desperate pleas for his life as did the families of six Egyptians kidnapped recently, although no group has yet claimed responsibility for kidnapping the men, all employed by the Egyptian telecom giant Orascom.
"This leads us to estimate that there are no political motivations behind these kidnappings," an Egyptian diplomat in Baghdad said.
The fate of two missing Italian women, both aid workers, remained unknown, despite two claims that they had been killed. An Italian daily Saturday published around 40 grisly pictures of beheadings of hostages in Iraq and Pakistan, riding roughshod over the feelings of families and friends of the two young aid workers, Simona Torretta and Simona Pari.
Il Foglio said the move was "to protest against the indifference, passivity, ignorance and submission with which the politicians and the media, above all in Italy, are facing up to the religious war and the clash of civilisations going on in the world."
In its daily battle against insurgents, the US military said its air force "conducted a strike inflicting a blow to the Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi terrorist network by conducting a precision strike on a known terrorist meeting site in central Fallujah."
Medics in the town said women and children were among the dead.
The military also disclosed the deaths of the five soldiers, one on Saturday in the Baghdad area by a roadside bomb, and four marines in three separate incidents on Friday in Al-Anbar province, which includes Fallujah.
Besides the Baghdad attack on national guard recruits in which seven Iraqis died, insurgents in the restive town of Baquba, north of Baghdad, killed a police officer.
At least one rocket and three mortar rounds struck Iraq's heavily fortified oil ministry building in Baghdad, causing some damage but no casualties.
Meanwhile, on a trip to the United States, the Iraqi premier assured the US administration that his forces could secure the country but demanded broader participation from the international community.
"I appeal to all representatives from the countries gathered here to help Iraq defeat the forces of terrorism and help Iraq build a better future for the people of Iraq," Allawi told the UN General Assembly.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell, meanwhile, told the New York Times Allawi wanted to organise a conference including G-8 and Middle Eastern countries in October to boost Iraq's electoral process.
Allawi insisted elections would go ahead as planned, but even US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged that the vote might have to exclude no-go zones like Fallujah.
Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, who has been stepping up his attacks against the US administration's handling of the war in Iraq, on Friday charged Allawi with turning a blind eye to reality in his country.
US President George W. Bush, who had earlier welcomed Allawi to the White House to help spread his optimistic view of Iraq's future, responded: "You can't lead this country if your ally in Iraq feels like you question his credibility."
Later, in his weekly radio address, Bush said: "The war for Iraq's freedom is a fight against some of the most ruthless and brutal men on Earth.
"In such a struggle, there will be good days and there will be difficult days. But every day, our resolve must remain the same."
A US soldier was sentenced on Saturday to 25 years confinement for the murder of an Iraqi national guard near the northern town of Tikrit, the US military said. "Specialist Federico Merida pled guilty to murder and making false official statements during court martial proceedings at Forward Operation Base Danger, Tikrit, Iraq," it said.
A military spokeswoman said the sentence had been reduced from 30 to 25 years, one of the heaviest sentences handed to a US serviceman since the start of the war in May 2003.
The soldier was found guilty of murdering an Iraqi national guard last May in the town of Ad-Dawr, near Tikrit.
In addition to the sentence, Merida was demoted to private and was given a dishonorable discharge, the statement said.