Iraqi Stragglers Hunted Down as Kuwait City Tries to Silence Guns : Security: Some resistance is still being reported. Exuberant shooting by citizens also is a problem.

Kuwaiti and American troops are using loudspeakers and guns to flush Iraqi soldiers and their supporters out of hiding in this shattered city, a process that will take days, officers said Sunday.

“This city is by no means secure. It will be another five or six days before we can say that,” said one U.S. Special Forces officer advising the Kuwaiti military.

Most Iraqi soldiers surrendered peacefully, but a few put up resistance.

As the officer spoke, automatic weapons fire sounded from an apartment building in the Hawalli district, where one Iraqi and two Palestinians were holed up.

“They were firing out of the apartment so we went in and took them out,” a Kuwaiti officer, Maj. Khalid Khaleel, said afterward.

The military--alerted to the Iraqis’ whereabouts by neighbors--is also driving trucks mounted with loudspeakers through the city, telling Iraqis and Palestinians that they will be treated well if they surrender.

More than 40 holdouts emerged from Hawalli on Sunday, including 10 Iraqi soldiers. Officers said more came out of other neighborhoods.

Kuwaiti officers said Iraqi soldiers were being found as far south as Wafra, near the Saudi border.

The military has also taken over the checkpoints that until now were manned by mostly teen-age members of the resistance. They search cars and lead away anyone found carrying a weapon or bullets without authorization, their hands tied behind them with tight plastic cords.

“If anybody has a weapon, it’s not over,” Khaleel said. “We’ve got to get those weapons out of here before this city is normal.”

Gangs of young resistance fighters still roam the streets in convoys of battered vehicles, many brandishing weapons and firing into the air in celebration of Kuwait’s liberation from Iraq.

Kuwaiti officers said some were reluctant to turn over their weapons, but there were few problems.

More than 120 rifles and a rocket launcher were handed in at a police station in the fashionable Faiha suburb on Sunday.

Hawalli’s outdoor market opened for the first time in weeks, and cars full of cheering, honking Kuwaitis careered along streets near the building where the army was fighting the Iraqi and Palestinian holdouts.

Mile-long lines for gasoline did not slow the use of cars for endless parades.

Even at military checkpoints, friends who had not seen the soldiers for months jumped out of their cars to embrace them.

Along the beachfront, French Foreign Legionnaires were clearing mines amid a forest of barbed wire and other Iraqi beach defenses set up against an allied amphibious assault that never came.

Kuwait city highways were being cleared of wrecked cars and military vehicles--many bursting with household goods and valuables--abandoned or destroyed in the Iraqi flight.

British and U.S. troops pushed wrecked cars and trucks from roads and swept away spent ammunition and debris.