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Reuters | Sky News |  PhotosMonday March 31, 04:40 AM |
U.S. bombs presidential palace By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. aircraft and cruise missiles have pounded
central Baghdad, hitting a presidential palace used by President Saddam
Hussein's son, as U.S. military leaders fended off growing criticism of
their war plans and insisted the campaign was still on course.
"We jumped off our seats," said Reuters correspondent Samia Nakhoul
early on the 12th day of the campaign to oust Saddam. "We can see flames
coming out of the palace" in a complex used by Qusay Hussein on the west
bank of the Tigris river.
On Sunday evening, another explosion rocked an area close to the Iraqi
Information Ministry, which U.S. Central Command headquarters in Qatar
said had been targeted with a cruise missile. Fires burned long into the
evening in that area.
Faced with much stronger than expected opposition from regular and
irregular forces loyal to Saddam, U.S. troops dug in south of Baghdad,
apparently in no rush to assault the Iraqi capital until air strikes and
artillery had ground down its defenders.
Round-the-clock air strikes hammered Baghdad as the U.S. military
sought to break the back of elite Republican Guard units entrenched in the
sprawling city's outskirts.
In Washington on Sunday, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
rejected criticism that he had launched the war with insufficient ground
strength, but predicted Iraqi resistance would stiffen even more as U.S.
troops approached Baghdad.
Some U.S. leaders and advocates of the war had predicted that many
Iraqi units would not fight and that U.S. troops would be welcomed as
liberators. But such rosy scenarios have not for the most part come to
pass.
Rumsfeld, facing scrutiny over his influence on a war plan that
involves far fewer troops than the number used in the 1991 Gulf War,
flatly denied reports that he had rejected advice from Pentagon planners
for substantially more men and armour.
RUMSFELD DENIES PENTAGON RIFT
"That is not true," Rumsfeld said on Sunday. "I think you'll find that
if you ask anyone who's been involved in the process from the Central
Command that every single thing they've requested has in fact happened."
Secretary of State Colin Powell, speaking on Sunday evening to a Jewish
group in Washington, said: "I have total confidence in the (war) plan and
total confidence in Gen. (Tommy) Franks and the other leaders who are
carrying out that plan."
Gen. Richard Myers, head of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the
campaign was going according to plan, with U.S. and British forces already
in control of 40 percent of Iraq, but he gave a clear signal that there
would be no swift ground assault on the Iraqi capital.
The aim before going in, he said, was to isolate Iraq's leadership and
cut it off from the rest of the country.
"We're not going to do anything before we're ready," Myers said. "We're
certainly not going to do anything to put our young men and women in
danger precipitously. We're also not going to put Iraqi civilians in
danger as well."
With casualties mounting, three U.S. troops were killed and a fourth
injured when a Marine helicopter crashed on Sunday in southern Iraq, U.S.
military spokesman said.
The U.S. military said 15 troops were injured on Sunday when a truck
driven by a man wearing civilian clothes drove into a group of soldiers
just outside a U.S. military base in Kuwait. The motives of the attacker,
who was shot and wounded, were unclear. The incident followed a suicide
attack inside Iraq on Saturday in which four U.S. soldiers died.
Still, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz said the war was going
very well for Iraq and U.S. and British predictions of an easy victory had
been proved false.
"They are surprised that the Iraqi people are resisting them
courageously with a great determination to deter them. We are not
surprised, we expected that, we said that," he said in a television
interview aired by the BBC.
FIGHTING AROUND BASRA
Also on Sunday, the U.S. military said it had bombed the main training
site for Iraqi Fedayeen paramilitary forces in eastern Baghdad, a
presidential palace, an intelligence complex and surface-to-air missile
sites.
Royal Marine commandos clashed with Iraqi paramilitary units south of
Basra on Sunday in sometimes fierce fighting that left one soldier dead
and an undetermined number wounded, a British military spokesman said.
British troops have still not tried to capture the southern city of 1.5
million, where more than a week of fighting has disrupted food and
electricity supplies and forced many civilians to flee the city.
President George W. Bush, backed by Britain, launched the war to
overthrow Saddam after saying he had refused to give up chemical and
biological weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. Iraq said it has
no such weapons and none has so far been found, although invading forces
have found several thousand chemical warfare suits in captured Iraqi
positions.
The United States has lost at least 39 dead and 104 injured with 17
listed as missing since the war began. Britain has lost 24 dead. Iraqi
Foreign Minister Naji Sabri, in a letter to U.N. Secretary General Kofi
Annan, said 420 Iraqi civilians had died and at least 4,000 were wounded
since the start of the war.
An Iraqi military spokesman, hailing Saturday's suicide bomb that
killed four U.S. troops, said 4,000 willing "martyrs" from across the Arab
world were already in Baghdad to fight.
Radical Palestinian group Islamic Jihad said it had sent would-be
suicide bombers to Baghdad to help Iraqis fight U.S. and British troops
and planned to send more. |
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