BEIRUT (Reuters) - Lebanon's Iranian-backed Hezbollah group took control of the Muslim half of Beirut on Friday, tightening its grip on the city in a major blow to the U.S.-backed government.

Security sources said at least 11 people had been killed and 30 wounded in three days of battles between pro-government gunmen and fighters loyal to Hezbollah, a Shi'ite political movement with a powerful guerrilla army.

The fighting, the worst internal strife since the 1975-90 civil war, was triggered this week after the government took decisions targeting Hezbollah's military communications network. The group said the government had declared war.

In scenes reminiscent of the darkest days of the civil war, young men armed with assault rifles roamed the streets amid smashed cars and smoldering buildings. Fighting died down by mid-morning and Hezbollah and allied fighters were in control as government supporters put down their weapons.

Hezbollah gunmen took control of media outlets owned by governing coalition leader Saad al-Hariri, Lebanon's strongest Sunni politician. Hariri's television and radio stations went off the air.

An opposition source told Reuters that Hezbollah and its allies would maintain road blocks that have paralyzed much of the city since Wednesday, including barricades on routes to the airport, until a resolution of their political conflict.

"All issues are linked. Beirut will remain shut until there is a political solution," the source said, referring to the dispute which triggered this week's violence and the rival sides' broader 17-month-long power struggle.

The crisis between the Hezbollah-led opposition, backed by Iran and Syria, and Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's anti-Syrian cabinet, backed by Washington and its Arab allies, has paralyzed the country and left it without a president since November 2007.

An influential pro-government leader called for dialogue.

"The party (Hezbollah), regardless of its military strength, cannot annul the other," Walid Jumblatt, leader of the Druze minority, told the pro-government LBC television. "Dialogue alone brings results. Running away from dialogue is not useful."

"TERRIFYING"

The dead included a woman and her 30-year-old son, who were killed when trying to flee Ras al-Nabae -- a mixed Sunni-Shi'ite Beirut district and scene of some of the heaviest clashes.

"They were trying to flee to the mountains. Instead ... they reached the hospital, dead," said a relative of the victims, who declined to give her name because of security fears.

"It was terrifying during the night. We couldn't even move about in the house," said another woman -- a resident of Ras al-Nabae who had fled the area at first light with her children. "We spent the night in the corridor."

Opposition gunmen of the Syrian Socialist National Party set ablaze a building housing studios of Hariri's TV station.

Hezbollah had been steadily seizing pro-government offices in the predominantly Muslim western half of the city.

Backed by the Shi'ite Amal group, Hezbollah fighters have been handing control of the offices to the army -- which is trying to play a neutral role in the crisis.

A security source said Hezbollah and its allies were in control of the mainly Muslim half of Beirut after pro-government gunmen laid down their weapons in their last bastion.

The gunmen in Tarek al-Jadeedi, a Sunni area whose residents are loyal to Hariri, had been in contact with Hezbollah to surrender, handing their posts to the Lebanese army.

Pro-Hariri gunmen in some villages in the eastern Bekaa Valley also surrendered their weapons to the Lebanese army.

BLOW TO GOVERNMENT

"It certainly leaves the government weaker and the Future movement weaker," said Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.

But the group did not want to be seen as "occupiers of Beirut" by keeping its fighters in areas whose residents' political loyalties lie with Hariri or his allies, he said. Handing control to the army appeared the most likely exit.

National carrier Middle East Airlines said all of its flights would be postponed until Saturday and Beirut seaport authority shut down the facility.

The European Union, Germany and France urged calm and a peaceful resolution. Syria said the issue was an internal Lebanese affair while Iran blamed "the adventurist interferences" of the United States and Israel for the violence.

Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said on Thursday the government had declared war by declaring the communications network illegal.

The group was the only Lebanese faction allowed to keep its weapons after the civil war to fight Israeli forces occupying the south. Israel withdrew in 2000 and the fate of Hezbollah's weapons is at the heart of the political crisis.

(Additional reporting by Nadim ladki and Laila Bassam, editing by Samia Nakhoul)

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