Violence Surges Through Central and Northern Iraq
By EDWARD WONG

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 20 - Violence surged through central and northern Iraq on Saturday as a tenacious insurgency led by Sunni Arabs kept up relentless assaults in a string of major cities, from Ramadi to Falluja to Baghdad.

At dawn, insurgents armed with Kalashnikov rifles and rocket-propelled grenades tried storming a police station in the northwestern Baghdad neighborhood of Amariya, where American and Iraqi soldiers had engaged in a bloody mosque shootout on Friday. The gun battle at the station left three Iraqi policemen dead and two others injured, Col. Adnan Abdul-Rahman, an Interior Ministry spokesman, said.

Hours later, a car bomb exploded in downtown Baghdad, at the eastern end of the bridge over the Tigris River leading to the fortified compound housing the American embassy and interim Iraqi government headquarters. The bomb was aimed at a convoy of vehicles from a Western security contractor, and at least one Iraqi was killed and another injured, witnesses said.

Four employees of the public works ministry were gunned down in a drive-by ambush, and three Iraqi National Guardsmen died in explosions in western Baghdad during gun battles with insurgents, Iraqi officials said.

An ambush on an American military convoy in central Baghdad ended with the death of one soldier, the military said. Nine others were wounded in what appeared to be a highly coordinated attack, with insurgents using explosives, automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.

Fighting raged in the rubble of Falluja, a city largely decimated by American troops during a week-long offensive. Two Marines were killed and four wounded in a guerilla ambush, military officials said. The offensive smashed a safe haven for the insurgents, but guerillas still roam the devastated streets, sniping at American troops and scaring away military engineers brought in to try to reconstruct the city.

At least 1,216 American troops have died since the start of the war.