Anonymous
7th April 2003, 05:39
U.S. Tightens Hold Around Baghdad
Major Roads From Capital Are Secured
An armor task force of the 3rd Infantry Division is on the front line of the Army's advance on northern Baghdad. Defenders who attacked the American columns were answered by fire from M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles and M1 Abrams tanks. (David Leeson -- The Dallas Morning News Via AP)
KUWAIT CITY, April 6 -- U.S. forces expanded northward on both flanks of Baghdad today and secured major roads leading from the Iraqi capital, tightening their hold on President Saddam Hussein's power base and probing his last defenses in the embattled city.
The sweeps provoked several intense engagements but encountered no coordinated resistance. They were undertaken even as U.S. commanders rapidly reinforced their positions around the capital, laying groundwork for what officers have predicted will be a deliberate, step-by-step campaign to strangle Hussein's government holding out in the city center and demoralize the urban guerrilla forces pledged to defend him to the death.
Lengthy convoys of U.S. tanks, armored vehicles and supply trucks streamed into Baghdad's international airport, turning it into a forward base housing about 7,000 soldiers and growing fast. After night fell, two C-130 Hercules transport aircraft, flying without lights for fear of missile or antiaircraft fire, became the first planes to touch down at the airport -- officially Saddam International, but rebaptized Baghdad International by U.S. troops -- since it was captured by the Army's 3rd Infantry Division on Friday.
As the U.S. troops maneuvered around Baghdad, British commanders ended a two-week standoff in Basra in southern Iraq and sent almost 60 tanks and armored personnel carriers deep into the city, the country's second-largest with 1.3 million inhabitants. British forces battled militiamen armed with rifles, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades and eventually seized control of the southern half of the city. By nightfall, the British had set up checkpoints inside Basra for the first time.
The Defense Ministry in London announced that the operation cost the lives of three British soldiers; there were no estimates of Iraqi casualties.
Meanwhile, in northern Iraq, two U.S. jets mistakenly bombed a convoy of Kurdish and U.S. troops, killing at least 18 Kurds and, according to Pentagon officials, apparently killing a U.S. Special Operations soldier. The bombing, near the village of Dibagah halfway between the major oil cities of Mosul and Kirkuk, was the worst known friendly fire incident of the war.
Ahmed Chalabi, an expatriate anti-government leader who has been in the Kurdish-controlled area of northern Iraq, was flown aboard a U.S. military transport along with several hundred militiamen to a base near Nasiriyah, a key crossroads along the Euphrates River about 100 miles north of the Kuwaiti border, a Pentagon official said. Chalabi, who heads the Iraqi National Congress, one of a number of U.S.-endorsed opposition groups, planned to help U.S. forces recruit support among the population, the official said.
In another apparent accident, five Russian diplomats were injured while evacuating Baghdad when their convoy was caught in a gun battle between U.S. and Iraqi troops west of the capital, witnesses said. A Russian journalist who was in the convoy said the vehicles were hit by U.S. forces, but the U.S. Central Command said at its regional headquarters in Doha, Qatar, that no U.S. or British forces were operating in the area at the time.
In Karbala, a city about 60 miles southwest of Baghdad that has been another militia stronghold, soldiers from the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division used a combination of airstrikes, artillery and small-arms fire to flush out hundreds of paramilitary fighters who have targeted American supply columns heading north. A U.S. brigade commander estimated that between 60 and 100 militiamen were killed and said the rest fled, prompting cheers and waves from thousands of residents. Hundreds of residents subsequently tore down a 25-foot bronze statue of Hussein.
Controlling the Highways
U.S. military officials said the movement of American troops around Baghdad was designed to prevent Hussein's government from reinforcing troops inside the city or fleeing to areas of the country not under the control of U.S. and British forces. "We do control the highways in and out of the city and do have the capability to interdict, to stop, to attack any Iraqi military forces that might try either to escape or to engage our forces," Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on CNN's "Late Edition."
The Army and Marines swung around the city in different directions. Elements of the 1st Marine Division began from an intersection in Baghdad's southeastern fringe, about six miles from the city center, that has become their staging area. The Marines traveled to the north and then to the northwest in a counterclockwise arc around the city.
Meanwhile, units from the 3rd Infantry Division moved in a clockwise direction, progressing to the northeast from the division's beachhead at the airport 12 miles west of downtown.
"Look at it from this point of view -- 1st Brigade holds the airport and the west of Baghdad, the 2nd Brigade is securing the south, the 3rd Brigade is holding the northwest and the Marines are in the northeast," Col. William Grimsley of the 3rd Infantry Division told the Reuters news service.
Although American tanks have circumnavigated much of Baghdad, Pace cautioned that U.S. troops do not control the city's entire perimeter. "To say that you have an impenetrable cordon around the city would be a misstatement," he said on ABC's "This Week" program.
The sky, he said, is a different matter. U.S. warplanes have started flying over Baghdad around the clock, coordinating precision strikes in advance of ground attacks. "It is certainly true that we have huge amounts of combat power around the city right now, and that we have over 1,000 planes in the air every day," he said. "So if it moves on the ground and it takes aggressive action, it's going to get killed."
The advance of U.S. troops on Baghdad and the movement of tanks around the city were not without resistance. Soldiers with grenade launchers and militiamen in white pickup trucks outfitted with machine guns fired on the American columns, drawing withering return fire from 25mm cannons mounted on M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles and 120mm shells lobbed by M1 Abrams tanks.
At nightfall, U.S. artillery shelling on Baghdad's southern fringe appeared to intensify, according to journalists in the downtown area. Heavy machine-gun fire and loud explosions also could be heard.
The streets of the capital were largely deserted during the day and almost totally empty after 6 p.m. -- when a newly instituted curfew took effect -- except for black-clad members of the Saddam's Fedayeen militia, the armed loyalists of the ruling Baath Party.
At his daily news conference in Baghdad, Information Minister Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf argued that Iraq troops had surrounded the Americans -- not the other way around. "The valiant Republican Guards are encircling the enemy near the airport," he said, asserting that Iraqi forces destroyed six U.S. tanks and killed 50 American soldiers.
The Pentagon has identified 61 U.S. soldiers and Marines killed in action or missing in action since the war began March 20. Its count lags behind reports from the field, however, as the reporting works its way up the military bureaucracy and families are notified.
'Considerable' Destruction
U.S. military officials estimated that 2,000 to 3,000 Iraqis were killed Saturday during a three-hour incursion by a column of U.S. tanks and armored personnel carriers into central Baghdad. But they acknowledged the estimate is based on the level of resistance and not a body count. Iraqi and foreign journalists in the capital have not seen such large numbers of bodies.
"We know it was a considerable amount of destruction," said Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, a spokesman for the Central Command in Doha. "In virtually every engagement we have, it's very one-sided."
A spokesman for the International Committee for the Red Cross, meanwhile, said Baghdad hospitals were overwhelmed with civilian casualties from U.S. bombing, artillery barrages and other fighting.
In an effort to demonstrate that Hussein still is in control of his increasingly chaotic capital, Iraqi state television aired brief footage of the president meeting with his top aides. An announcer said the meeting occurred today, but there was no way to independently verify that. The announcer also said Hussein urged soldiers separated from their regular units to join up with any unit they could find, an indirect acknowledgment of some disarray in Iraqi defenses, and promised that anyone who destroys an American tank would receive a $5,000 reward.
U.S. forces probing around Baghdad continued to find evidence that the Republican Guard has suffered wholesale defections. A Marine light armored unit operating on the east side of the capital on Saturday night ran into 16 T-72 tanks and 29 armored vehicles in the area where the Al Nida Division had been based -- all of them empty. The T-72s are Iraq's most advanced tanks and their abandonment was regarded by U.S. officials as a stark example of the Guard's collapse.
"Where have these guys gone?" said Lt. Col. David Pere, the senior watch officer at Marine headquarters, which has been temporarily moved back to Kuwait in preparation for a jump closer to Baghdad. "The array of forces we thought we'd experience, we just haven't found."
Some Marine units were targeted by persistent artillery and rocket fire from inside Baghdad. Elsewhere, Iraqi defenders blew up two bridges along the Diyala River on the eastern side of Baghdad in an effort to block U.S. forces, the first time Iraq has destroyed any of its bridges to slow the American advance.
Fighting Non-Iraqi Arabs
U.S. military officials said today that some of the toughest combat that American forces have encountered in recent days has been with non-Iraqi Arabs who have come from other countries to fight. U.S. officers described the foreign Arab fighters as relatively small in number, lightly armed and mixed in with regular and Republican Guard units.
"What we've seen at times were 25 to 30 individuals trying to swarm a light armored vehicle and the light armored vehicle with its weapons was just mowing them down," said Lt. Col. George Smith, a top Marine staff officer. "Some of those that survived the fire would just get back up and continue to charge."
On Saturday night, elements of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force raided a site that may have been a training camp for non-Iraqi fighters near Salman Pak, a suburban town 15 miles southeast of downtown Baghdad, Brooks said. He said the camp was destroyed in the operation.
U.S. commanders began to breathe easier about the prospect of a chemical weapons attack. Now that their main forces are pressing into Baghdad right up against the remnants of Iraq's troops, U.S. strategists believe the chances of an attack with unconventional weapons have decreased, leading them to downgrade the odds from "likely" to only "possible." As a result, many Army and Marine units were allowed to take off their bulky, sweaty chemical protection suits and required only to keep their gas masks at their sides.
That did not keep U.S. forces from continuing to search for stashes of chemical weapons. The Marines today were searching five sites around Baghdad. However, excavation at a school where the Marines had been told something suspicious had been buried turned up nothing, officers said.
While not finding unconventional weapons, U.S. troops found vast quantities of the regular variety, including four caches with armaments evidently left by deserting Iraqi troops. At one such cache, the Marines said, they found 10 tons of ordnance, including 12 SA-7 surface-to-air missiles. At another, they found 15 surface-to-surface missiles, thousands of rocket-propelled grenades, AK-47 assault rifles, mortars and bombs.
Baker reported from Camp Commando, Kuwait. Correspondent Alan Sipress in Doha, Qatar, and staff writer Bradley Graham in Washington contributed to this report.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43492-2003Apr6.html)
Major Roads From Capital Are Secured
An armor task force of the 3rd Infantry Division is on the front line of the Army's advance on northern Baghdad. Defenders who attacked the American columns were answered by fire from M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles and M1 Abrams tanks. (David Leeson -- The Dallas Morning News Via AP)
KUWAIT CITY, April 6 -- U.S. forces expanded northward on both flanks of Baghdad today and secured major roads leading from the Iraqi capital, tightening their hold on President Saddam Hussein's power base and probing his last defenses in the embattled city.
The sweeps provoked several intense engagements but encountered no coordinated resistance. They were undertaken even as U.S. commanders rapidly reinforced their positions around the capital, laying groundwork for what officers have predicted will be a deliberate, step-by-step campaign to strangle Hussein's government holding out in the city center and demoralize the urban guerrilla forces pledged to defend him to the death.
Lengthy convoys of U.S. tanks, armored vehicles and supply trucks streamed into Baghdad's international airport, turning it into a forward base housing about 7,000 soldiers and growing fast. After night fell, two C-130 Hercules transport aircraft, flying without lights for fear of missile or antiaircraft fire, became the first planes to touch down at the airport -- officially Saddam International, but rebaptized Baghdad International by U.S. troops -- since it was captured by the Army's 3rd Infantry Division on Friday.
As the U.S. troops maneuvered around Baghdad, British commanders ended a two-week standoff in Basra in southern Iraq and sent almost 60 tanks and armored personnel carriers deep into the city, the country's second-largest with 1.3 million inhabitants. British forces battled militiamen armed with rifles, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades and eventually seized control of the southern half of the city. By nightfall, the British had set up checkpoints inside Basra for the first time.
The Defense Ministry in London announced that the operation cost the lives of three British soldiers; there were no estimates of Iraqi casualties.
Meanwhile, in northern Iraq, two U.S. jets mistakenly bombed a convoy of Kurdish and U.S. troops, killing at least 18 Kurds and, according to Pentagon officials, apparently killing a U.S. Special Operations soldier. The bombing, near the village of Dibagah halfway between the major oil cities of Mosul and Kirkuk, was the worst known friendly fire incident of the war.
Ahmed Chalabi, an expatriate anti-government leader who has been in the Kurdish-controlled area of northern Iraq, was flown aboard a U.S. military transport along with several hundred militiamen to a base near Nasiriyah, a key crossroads along the Euphrates River about 100 miles north of the Kuwaiti border, a Pentagon official said. Chalabi, who heads the Iraqi National Congress, one of a number of U.S.-endorsed opposition groups, planned to help U.S. forces recruit support among the population, the official said.
In another apparent accident, five Russian diplomats were injured while evacuating Baghdad when their convoy was caught in a gun battle between U.S. and Iraqi troops west of the capital, witnesses said. A Russian journalist who was in the convoy said the vehicles were hit by U.S. forces, but the U.S. Central Command said at its regional headquarters in Doha, Qatar, that no U.S. or British forces were operating in the area at the time.
In Karbala, a city about 60 miles southwest of Baghdad that has been another militia stronghold, soldiers from the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division used a combination of airstrikes, artillery and small-arms fire to flush out hundreds of paramilitary fighters who have targeted American supply columns heading north. A U.S. brigade commander estimated that between 60 and 100 militiamen were killed and said the rest fled, prompting cheers and waves from thousands of residents. Hundreds of residents subsequently tore down a 25-foot bronze statue of Hussein.
Controlling the Highways
U.S. military officials said the movement of American troops around Baghdad was designed to prevent Hussein's government from reinforcing troops inside the city or fleeing to areas of the country not under the control of U.S. and British forces. "We do control the highways in and out of the city and do have the capability to interdict, to stop, to attack any Iraqi military forces that might try either to escape or to engage our forces," Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on CNN's "Late Edition."
The Army and Marines swung around the city in different directions. Elements of the 1st Marine Division began from an intersection in Baghdad's southeastern fringe, about six miles from the city center, that has become their staging area. The Marines traveled to the north and then to the northwest in a counterclockwise arc around the city.
Meanwhile, units from the 3rd Infantry Division moved in a clockwise direction, progressing to the northeast from the division's beachhead at the airport 12 miles west of downtown.
"Look at it from this point of view -- 1st Brigade holds the airport and the west of Baghdad, the 2nd Brigade is securing the south, the 3rd Brigade is holding the northwest and the Marines are in the northeast," Col. William Grimsley of the 3rd Infantry Division told the Reuters news service.
Although American tanks have circumnavigated much of Baghdad, Pace cautioned that U.S. troops do not control the city's entire perimeter. "To say that you have an impenetrable cordon around the city would be a misstatement," he said on ABC's "This Week" program.
The sky, he said, is a different matter. U.S. warplanes have started flying over Baghdad around the clock, coordinating precision strikes in advance of ground attacks. "It is certainly true that we have huge amounts of combat power around the city right now, and that we have over 1,000 planes in the air every day," he said. "So if it moves on the ground and it takes aggressive action, it's going to get killed."
The advance of U.S. troops on Baghdad and the movement of tanks around the city were not without resistance. Soldiers with grenade launchers and militiamen in white pickup trucks outfitted with machine guns fired on the American columns, drawing withering return fire from 25mm cannons mounted on M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles and 120mm shells lobbed by M1 Abrams tanks.
At nightfall, U.S. artillery shelling on Baghdad's southern fringe appeared to intensify, according to journalists in the downtown area. Heavy machine-gun fire and loud explosions also could be heard.
The streets of the capital were largely deserted during the day and almost totally empty after 6 p.m. -- when a newly instituted curfew took effect -- except for black-clad members of the Saddam's Fedayeen militia, the armed loyalists of the ruling Baath Party.
At his daily news conference in Baghdad, Information Minister Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf argued that Iraq troops had surrounded the Americans -- not the other way around. "The valiant Republican Guards are encircling the enemy near the airport," he said, asserting that Iraqi forces destroyed six U.S. tanks and killed 50 American soldiers.
The Pentagon has identified 61 U.S. soldiers and Marines killed in action or missing in action since the war began March 20. Its count lags behind reports from the field, however, as the reporting works its way up the military bureaucracy and families are notified.
'Considerable' Destruction
U.S. military officials estimated that 2,000 to 3,000 Iraqis were killed Saturday during a three-hour incursion by a column of U.S. tanks and armored personnel carriers into central Baghdad. But they acknowledged the estimate is based on the level of resistance and not a body count. Iraqi and foreign journalists in the capital have not seen such large numbers of bodies.
"We know it was a considerable amount of destruction," said Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, a spokesman for the Central Command in Doha. "In virtually every engagement we have, it's very one-sided."
A spokesman for the International Committee for the Red Cross, meanwhile, said Baghdad hospitals were overwhelmed with civilian casualties from U.S. bombing, artillery barrages and other fighting.
In an effort to demonstrate that Hussein still is in control of his increasingly chaotic capital, Iraqi state television aired brief footage of the president meeting with his top aides. An announcer said the meeting occurred today, but there was no way to independently verify that. The announcer also said Hussein urged soldiers separated from their regular units to join up with any unit they could find, an indirect acknowledgment of some disarray in Iraqi defenses, and promised that anyone who destroys an American tank would receive a $5,000 reward.
U.S. forces probing around Baghdad continued to find evidence that the Republican Guard has suffered wholesale defections. A Marine light armored unit operating on the east side of the capital on Saturday night ran into 16 T-72 tanks and 29 armored vehicles in the area where the Al Nida Division had been based -- all of them empty. The T-72s are Iraq's most advanced tanks and their abandonment was regarded by U.S. officials as a stark example of the Guard's collapse.
"Where have these guys gone?" said Lt. Col. David Pere, the senior watch officer at Marine headquarters, which has been temporarily moved back to Kuwait in preparation for a jump closer to Baghdad. "The array of forces we thought we'd experience, we just haven't found."
Some Marine units were targeted by persistent artillery and rocket fire from inside Baghdad. Elsewhere, Iraqi defenders blew up two bridges along the Diyala River on the eastern side of Baghdad in an effort to block U.S. forces, the first time Iraq has destroyed any of its bridges to slow the American advance.
Fighting Non-Iraqi Arabs
U.S. military officials said today that some of the toughest combat that American forces have encountered in recent days has been with non-Iraqi Arabs who have come from other countries to fight. U.S. officers described the foreign Arab fighters as relatively small in number, lightly armed and mixed in with regular and Republican Guard units.
"What we've seen at times were 25 to 30 individuals trying to swarm a light armored vehicle and the light armored vehicle with its weapons was just mowing them down," said Lt. Col. George Smith, a top Marine staff officer. "Some of those that survived the fire would just get back up and continue to charge."
On Saturday night, elements of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force raided a site that may have been a training camp for non-Iraqi fighters near Salman Pak, a suburban town 15 miles southeast of downtown Baghdad, Brooks said. He said the camp was destroyed in the operation.
U.S. commanders began to breathe easier about the prospect of a chemical weapons attack. Now that their main forces are pressing into Baghdad right up against the remnants of Iraq's troops, U.S. strategists believe the chances of an attack with unconventional weapons have decreased, leading them to downgrade the odds from "likely" to only "possible." As a result, many Army and Marine units were allowed to take off their bulky, sweaty chemical protection suits and required only to keep their gas masks at their sides.
That did not keep U.S. forces from continuing to search for stashes of chemical weapons. The Marines today were searching five sites around Baghdad. However, excavation at a school where the Marines had been told something suspicious had been buried turned up nothing, officers said.
While not finding unconventional weapons, U.S. troops found vast quantities of the regular variety, including four caches with armaments evidently left by deserting Iraqi troops. At one such cache, the Marines said, they found 10 tons of ordnance, including 12 SA-7 surface-to-air missiles. At another, they found 15 surface-to-surface missiles, thousands of rocket-propelled grenades, AK-47 assault rifles, mortars and bombs.
Baker reported from Camp Commando, Kuwait. Correspondent Alan Sipress in Doha, Qatar, and staff writer Bradley Graham in Washington contributed to this report.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43492-2003Apr6.html)