WITH HIS face masked in a checked head shawl, Abu Mohammed’s eyes flashed and his voice rose as he described the panic and terror of the young American soldiers as his men attacked.

The operation, he said, followed an effective pattern: strike at the first vehicle with a grenade, wait for the ensuing panic and then attack the rest of the convoy.

“Once the first hand grenade had been thrown, the entire line of about 20 vehicles stopped,” he said. “We watched panic and confusion, with their soldiers firing randomly, while others called in for help on their radios.

“Then four of our men in the rear fired mortars and rocket-propelled grenades against some of the remaining vehicles. By the time the American air support arrived we were on our way home.”

Sitting in a sparsely furnished room lit by a single light bulb, Mohammed, 27, added: “We shall show them worse days to come.” The five masked guerrillas who flanked him nodded.

Hit-and-run attacks are now regularly employed by fighters who have claimed the lives of more than 50 US soldiers since the Iraq war ended. Mohammed and members of his cell last week gave the first detailed account of the disparate but determined armed opposition faced by US and British troops.

The meeting was arranged by a young militant whose brother is in the cell. We had driven to Ramadi, a stronghold of Sunni Muslims that forms part of a triangular area of land the Americans suspect harbours groups sympathetic to Saddam Hussein.

Our guide had steered us across a bridge and into a maze of dirt roads that snaked around farmland and riverbeds of the Euphrates. It was an area unconquered, he boasted.

The car stopped and we were beckoned towards some palm trees. We walked in silence through the shadows for 15 minutes, before arriving at a 12ft-square hut with its metal door ajar.

Six masked figures sat at the end of the concrete room. The floor was lined with American-made grenades. The walls were bare, apart from a 2003 Iraqi football calendar and another advertising a cruise ship.

The men insisted they fought to liberate their country and warned that resistance would intensify. Abu Sabaa, the leader of the 15-strong cell, said they would continue their fight — regardless of the fate of the former Iraqi leader. “Even if Saddam were to be killed tomorrow, the resistance would continue. In fact, it would increase,” he said.

Sabaa is a former member of Saddam’s special security force. Other members of the group are local traders. They joined forces after the fall of Saddam and agreed to fight under the banner: “Rejection of the occupation”.

Funds provided by sympathisers are used to buy weapons and to pay for intelligence.

Iraqi experts have described the resistance as a loose network of former Ba’ath party members, Iraqi soldiers, intelligence officers and Saddam supporters.

The guerrillas claimed there were at least eight different rebel groups. They aim to emulate the Palestinian militants and the Lebanese Hezbollah, which drove Israeli forces from southern Lebanon after a 22-year occupation.

The Iraqis are also believed to have been joined by a number of foreign Al-Qaeda militants. One of the terror group’s senior members, who lives in London, claimed hundreds of its members from Morocco, Syria, Pakistan and Algeria — many of them veterans of Afghanistan — had travelled to Iraq.

“Before the war Arab militants had to go after infidels in America or the West with hijackings and suicide bombs but now they find the Americans there in the land of Islam waiting for them. They can’t believe their luck,” he said.

Additional reporting: Christina Lamb