Colonel Michael Regner, chief of operations of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said marines were clashing with small groups of rebels, sometimes as many as a dozen at a time.

"Very few have given up," he in a telephone interview from Fallujah with reporters at the Pentagon. "They are fighting to the death, and they're making it difficult on marines and soldiers."

But he said marines have accomplished all objectives of an eight-day-old assault on the insurgent bastion in record time.

"We have and we can go anywhere we want in that city," he said.

Regner said the assault on the city unfolded according to plan with a main force sweeping from the north to the south of the city, sealing off bridges into the city from both the west and the east.

"Of course, we knew from our intelligence sources where the stiff pockets of resistance would be. There were no surprises," he said. "The intelligence community did marvelous deeds in what they've provided for us."

As they proceeded south, the marines flanked the insurgent force so that if they escaped through the city's southernmost bridges they would run into a blocking force.

"But in fact they did not do that," he said. "Most of those forces decided, 'We either swim the Euphrates River or we turn ourselves in,' which some did, or many -- as we see today -- many have determined themselves to go ahead and fight to the death."

Regner said 1,052 people have been detained by US forces in Fallujah, including a small number of people from other countries. He estimated that no more than two dozen of the detainees were foreigners.

An Iraqi general on Friday said only 15 foreign fighters had been captured in Fallujah, including 10 Iranians, a Saudi, a Sudanese, an Egyptian, a Jordanian and a French speaker whose nationality was unknown.

Regner acknowledged that some insurgents were able to flee the city.

"They have escaped the city of Fallujah and ... moved into Ramadi or some of the other cities in the area," he said.

Insurgents in Ramadi, the capital of al-Anbar province, have challenged marines there over the past week, he said, prompting the deployment of two US marine battalions in the city, Regner said.

"Do we control Ramadi? Yes we control it. But again it is not at this time a clear city," he said.

The deployment of a fresh battalion in Ramadi caught insurgents off guard, and the number of weapons caches and insurgents killed or captured there were at "a higher level than it has been in the past," he said.

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