April 6 —
Chipping away at the vestiges of Saddam Hussein's power, U.S.
forces encircled Baghdad on Sunday and began flying into the
capital's airport. British forces in the south made their deepest
push into Iraq's second largest city.
Monday morning brought to Baghdad the scream of missiles, the
thud of artillery shells and the crackle of heavy machine gun fire.
Buildings in the city shook violently with the explosions.
A hulking U.S. C-130 transport plane landed at the Baghdad
international airport Sunday, carrying unknown cargo but weighted
with symbolism and tactical importance. The arrival presaged a major
resupply effort by air for U.S. troops, dependent until now on a
tenuous line stretching 350 miles to Kuwait.
U.S. officials declared Baghdad cut off from the rest of
Iraq.
"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 to either escape or to engage our forces,"
said Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff.
Marines closing in on Baghdad from the south were told to take
off their protective suits Monday for the first time in 20 days, a
sign of easing fears of possible use of chemical or biological
weapons.
Intense fighting took a growing toll on combatants and civilians.
Injured Russian diplomats and a convoy of America's Kurdish comrades
in arms were among unintended victims caught in crossfire and
friendly fire Sunday. Kurds said 18 of their own died in the
mistaken U.S. air strike.
Assorted prizes fell into allied hands, some after hard fighting,
but U.S. forces had yet to confront Baghdad's last-ditch defenders
on a large scale.
"They are extremely weakened, but that does not mean they're
finished," Pace said of the Republican Guard.
Inside a VIP building at the airport, troops found a lavish
hideaway believed to have been used by Saddam, Associated Press
Television News reported.
Southeast of Baghdad, Marines seized one of Saddam's palaces,
poked through remnants of a Republican Guard headquarters and
searched a suspected terrorist training camp, finding the shell of a
passenger jet believed to be used for hijacking practice.
Also to the south, U.S. forces on took control Sunday of the
center of the holy city of Karbala, the Army Times newspaper
reported from the scene.
U.S. forces consolidated positions around Baghdad a day after
raiding the capital and killing perhaps several thousand Iraqi
shooters, by rough U.S. estimates.
On Sunday, U.S. forces made their second foray into the city,
testing Iraqi defenses and destroying all of the Iraqi vehicles and
fighters they came in contact with, U.S. officials said.
Pace said the Republican Guard's main weapons systems are gone
and the force probably cannot assemble more than 1,000 men in any
one place.
On another vital front, British troops thrust to the center of
Basra, Iraq's second largest city, with a sense they were finally
shaking Saddam loyalists loose.
British Desert Rats went into the city of 1.3 million with more
than three dozen tanks and armored cars, a column similar in size to
the American unit that probed suburban Baghdad, then got quickly
out. But the British found resistance softer than expected, picked
up reports that the local Baath Party leadership was crumbling and
fought into the core, losing at least three soldiers and finding
their arrival cheered by hundreds of citizens.
"We have a lot of it occupied," British Maj. Gen. Peter Wall told
the BBC. He said it might take days to put down renegades.
In chalking up military gains, the United States accelerated a
campaign of persuasion, too, aimed at getting the Iraqi Republican
Guard to give up. And Washington's attention began turning to
postwar Iraq.
Pace said the United States would welcome Republican Guard
division commanders and troops in a postwar government if they
surrendered now.
"I mean, there's a small clique around Saddam Hussein who are the
perpetrators of all the crimes against humanity," Pace said on ABC's
"This Week."
"Below them are still many senior leaders and troops who have
their free will to decide what their life is going to be like. They
can surrender and become part of the future free Iraq, or they can
fight and die."
The United States is deploying some of Iraq's exiles and internal
dissidents around the country to help root out pro-Saddam elements,
keep order and distribute aid, according to one such organization,
the Iraq National Congress. The group said several hundred of its
members were flown to an area near the city of Nasiriyah.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said it will probably
take more than six months once the war is over before a new Iraqi
government can take over.
In northern Iraq, U.S. warplanes struck a convoy of allied
Kurdish fighters and U.S. special forces Sunday in one of the
deadliest friendly fire attacks of the war. At least 18 people were
killed and more than 45 wounded, including senior Kurdish
commanders, Kurdish officials said.
U.S. Central Command only reported one civilian killed and six
people injured, including a U.S. soldier, but its investigation was
not complete.
A convoy of Russian diplomats, including the ambassador, came
under fire Sunday while evacuating Baghdad, the Russian foreign
ministry said. A correspondent for state-run Russian television said
the convoy was caught in a crossfire and three diplomats were hurt,
one with a serious stomach wound.
U.S. Central Command said no allied forces were operating in the
area at the time, but it was investigating what happened.
In and around Baghdad, civilians were caught up in the
intensified ground fighting.
At the al-Kindi hospital in a working-class Baghdad district,
scores of civilians with shrapnel wounds have been coming in since
Saturday night. Among them were eight members of one family.
In one ward, several children wore bloodstained casts on their
legs and arms, and some had difficulty breathing. One girl had
bandages over half her face.
British tasted a breakthrough in Basra against Saddam's hard-core
militia.
"Their days are limited," said Brigadier Graham Binns, commander
of the Desert Rats. "Our intelligence tells us that morale is low
among the defenders of the city, that the population can't wait to
see us, and the opposition such as it is, is uncoordinated."
A statement broadcast on Iraqi state television in Saddam's name
was typically defiant but hinted at problems coordinating the
nation's defense. It urged soldiers who had been separated from
regular units to join up with any unit they could find.
Central Command officials estimated Sunday that 2,000 to 3,000
Iraqi fighters died in the 3rd Infantry Division's 25-mile incursion
in an industrial section of Baghdad a day earlier.
Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks gave no specifics on how the estimate
was reached. More than three dozen tanks and armored vehicles staged
the raid; U.S. casualties were described as light.
photo credit
and caption:
A British tank with the 7th
Armored Brigade, known as the "Desert Rats," moves into
northern Basra, Iraq, Sunday, April 6, 2003. British troops
staged their largest military incursion into the southern city
of Basra, rumbling into Iraq's second-largest city with a
column of 40 armored personnel carriers Sunday. (AP
Photo/Daily Mail, Bruce Adams,
POOL)
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