"The war is very long, and always think of this as the beginning,'' he said. "And always make the enemy think that yesterday was better than today.''

Rebels Attack in Central Iraq and the North
By EDWARD WONG and JAMES GLANZ

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 15 - A rebel counteroffensive swept through central and northern Iraq on Monday as American troops struggled to flush the remaining insurgents from the rubble-strewn streets of Falluja.

Guerrillas in Baquba, Mosul, Kirkuk and Suwaira stormed police stations, set oil wells ablaze and struck at American military convoys with suicide car bombs, routing Iraqi security forces in several coordinated assaults and severely damaging parts of the country's petroleum-based economic lifeline.

A five-hour gun battle broke out in the southernmost reaches of Falluja on Monday morning, a day after tanks and other armored vehicles fought their way through the area and had seemingly quashed all remaining resistance to the weeklong offensive. But some rebels had stayed hidden in the bombed-out landscape of the district and came out fighting around dawn, killing at least two marines.

"They're clearly fighting until the last man,'' said Lt. Col. Gareth Brandl, commander of the First Battalion, Eighth Regiment, First Marine Expeditionary Force.

The wave of attacks across the Sunni Muslim heartland suggested that guerrillas were ready to carry on the war despite the loss of their safe haven in Falluja. The most intense fighting took place in the morning in Baquba, northeast of the capital. Insurgents there ambushed American troops near a downtown police station and laid siege to another station in a southern suburb.

As the Americans battled near the first station, more insurgents began firing down on them from a nearby mosque, said Capt. Bill Coppernoll, a spokesman for the Army's First Infantry Division. The fighting became so intense that American jets dropped two 500-pound bombs on the insurgents, and up to 20 fighters were killed, he said.

Overnight, insurgents attacked an oil storage tank in the north and set fire to four oil wells. In Mosul, torn by a daring revolt that began last week, guerrillas tried ramming an American patrol and a checkpoint with suicide car bombs, wounding at least five soldiers. The Iraqi interior minister, Falah al-Naqib, said he expected the rebels to mount more ambitious strikes.