Defense Ministry officials said the government had not made a decision on the request, which will be announced to the House of Commons by British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon today, but other sources said the appeal would be "very difficult to refuse."

U.S. forces continued to hammer Fallujah yesterday with missile and tank fire, as they have done since city leaders late last week turned down a demand from Prime Minister Iyad Allawi that they turn over terror mastermind Abu Musab Zarqawi.
    Witnesses reported heavy fighting between U.S. and rebel forces on the eastern and southern edges of the city with clashes blocking the main road to Baghdad, 40 miles to the east.
    The Associated Press said that a Humvee was seen burning in the eastern edge of the city and that hospital officials reported three civilians killed. There was no casualty report from the U.S. military.
    The skirmishes were seen as preparatory to a much larger attack on the city, designed to re-establish government control over Fallujah, Ramadi and other rebel hotbeds ahead of elections scheduled for January.
    Inside Fallujah, hundreds of rebels armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers, machine guns and assault rifles have taken up position along the main street awaiting the attack, an Iraqi reporter told The Washington Times.
    Fighters are also stationed on the rooftops, and Abdullah Janabi, a leader of the rebel Islamic Council that controls the city, warned that any "invaders and infidels" would face imminent death, said reporter Aqil Jabbar.
    The requested redeployment of British forces would free up the 2nd Battalion of the U.S. 24th Marines to take part in the attack on Fallujah.
    Britain's highly regarded Black Watch regiment would replace the Marines in the mainly Shi'ite city of Iskandariya, where the United States has a base, and the Sunni flash points of Mahmoudiya and Latifiya.
    It was in Latifiya that Zarqawi's Tawhid and Jihad terror group is believed to have held and beheaded two American contractors and their British colleague Kenneth Bigley. Attackers killed nine Iraqi police recruits in the town yesterday as they returned from training in Jordan.
    Mr. Hoon, when he briefs Parliament today, can expect a barrage of criticism from both the pro-war Conservatives and the smaller but growing anti-war Liberal Democrats.
    The Conservatives' defense spokesman Nicholas Soames has already challenged the timing of the deployment, saying it looked like "a political gesture," and charged that the concept of peacekeeping was "alien" to the Americans.
    Mr. Soames maintained that British forces would need to have a major say in how anti-terrorist operations were carried out or the deployment could prompt a backlash that would place British forces in severe and unnecessary danger.
    "I can see politically why they want it, but militarily I don't get it," he said in a television interview last night.
    Former top military officials also expressed reservations yesterday evening.
    John Walker, a former chief of defense intelligence, said that by committing troops to flash points around Baghdad, Prime Minister Tony Blair risked creating a Vietnam-like spiral of involvement.
    "This is the way that mission creep starts in a big way," he said. "You get deeper and deeper in."
    British commanders in Basra said, according to the London Sunday Telegraph, that moving the Black Watch, the main reserve unit in the British sector, could leave their troops without reinforcement in the event of a new outbreak of fighting in the south.
    The Telegraph also cited suggestions that the United States would like to see its allies sharing more of the casualties in Iraq.
    "There is a perception out there that this is an American war and only our soldiers are being killed. If the British re-deploying outside their current theater of operations helps dispel that perception, then that's a useful byproduct," a senior U.S. officer in Baghdad told the paper.
    Robin Cook, who resigned as foreign secretary just before the war, said British soldiers would lose the respect of Iraqis if they were forced to adopt American tactics.
    "For a year, Britain has been trying in vain to persuade U.S. forces to show the same restraint as our troops, who have won a lot of local goodwill as a result," he told the London Sunday Times.
    "The real risk of sending a British battalion into the U.S. sector is that our troops could become associated in Iraqi minds with U.S. methods. The last time U.S. forces attacked Fallujah, they left 1,000 civilians dead and uproar across Iraq at their heavy-handed tactics."
    But Labor member Bruce George, chairman of the parliamentary defense committee, said he would support the move "if it is militarily necessary."
    "The alternative appears to be to carry on being largely reactive to insurgent attacks, bombings, kidnappings and assassinations. It appears that the U.S. wish to be more proactive and fight them on their adopted home territory in Fallujah."