U.S. troops struck in the heart of Baghdad early Monday, entering at least one of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s main palaces, the Al Rashid Hotel and possibly the Information Ministry.
It was the first significant strike in the center of the capital, which U.S. troops say they have encircled. The Pentagon said the incursion was a “show of force” to test the Iraqi military’s response.
According to the Reuters news agency, 65 tanks and 45 Bradley Fighting Vehicles were involved in the raids, which were unleashed after dawn local time. Witnesses said Iraq’s Republican Guard were defending the ministries with rocket-propelled grenades.
Huge oil trenches were lit by Iraqi forces, cloaking the skies above Baghdad with gray clouds. Small arms fire and some explosions echoed on the virtually empty streets of the city of 5 million.
U.S. military officials said the raids were intended to find members of Hussein’s leadership and to secure buildings in the capital against sabotage or further destruction.
“It is part of our ongoing mission to seek out members of the Iraqi regime, and we are working to preserve the treasures of Baghdad, its palaces, hospitals and things, for the Iraqi people,” said Navy Ensign David Luckett, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command in Qatar.
The main presidential palace is a sprawling compound on the Tigris River and is considered the seat of Hussein’s regime. It occupies a central location in Baghdad. The Information Ministry is also a key lever for the regime.
The Al Rashid Hotel is an Iraqi landmark and an irritant to some U.S. officials because the Iraqi owners have created an unflattering likeness of the first President George Bush in tile on the floor so that visitors walk on his image.
“Saddam Hussein says he owns Baghdad. We own Baghdad. We own his palace. We own downtown,” a 3rd Infantry Division officer told Fox News in a live interview from the presidential palace.
The deepest penetration of the capital yet came a day after allied forces had seized all major roads in and out of the city and began landing supplies at Baghdad’s airport.
On Sunday, Baghdad’s streets crawled with gun-toting teenagers and Fedayeen militia, the armed loyalists of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, as U.S. officials warned that “significant combat” could lie ahead.
A hulking C-130 transport plane arrived Sunday night carrying undisclosed cargo and the promise of a faster, safer way to resupply troops arrayed around Hussein’s shrinking base of power.
British troops and tanks easily seized control over half of Basra, southern Iraq’s largest city. They killed hundreds of Iraqi fighters but avoided the block-by-block street battles they had feared during a more than two-week siege of the city. Allied commanders hoped the British surge into Basra would encourage resistance to Hussein in Baghdad as well by demonstrating that his government is fast losing control of major population centers.
A disturbing allied error also marked the intense day of battles. American aircraft mistakenly attacked a convoy of U.S. Special Forces and allied Kurdish troops. Kurdish officials said at least 18 people were killed and 45 wounded, which would make it the worst friendly fire incident of the war. At least one member of the Special Forces was wounded, according to U.S. Central Command.
The incident took place on a day when allied troops grabbed Shir Khan, the first sizeable northern town to be taken from Hussein’s retreating army.
Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said incursions Sunday through portions of the Iraqi capital involved “significant numbers of coalition tanks and armored personnel carriers,” and that they destroyed “all of the enemy vehicles and personnel with whom they’ve come in contact.”
A day earlier, U.S. officials said, the 3rd Infantry Division’s first armored foray into southwestern Baghdad killed 2,000 to 3,000 Iraqi fighters.
Pace said the strength of the Iraqi defenses around Baghdad, including the diminished Republican Guard, remains unclear. “Some of the soldiers certainly have just decided to go home,” he said. “Some may have moved to other places on the battlefield.”
Pace called on the remaining Iraqi generals to surrender, urging them to “give you and your troops a chance to be part of Iraq’s future and not Iraq’s past.”
Iraqi leaders remained defiant. In a statement attributed to Hussein that was read on Iraqi TV, he urged troops separated from their combat squads to join other fighters in fending off the Americans–a possible indication of disarray among Iraq’s soldiers.
The escalation of firefights in the capital was taking its toll on residents. At the al-Kindi hospital in a working-class neighborhood of the city, scores of people with shrapnel wounds began arriving Saturday night.
The ground combat around Baghdad also damaged the already strained relations between the U.S. and Russia. On the same day that President Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, arrived in Moscow to smooth those relations, a Russian diplomatic convoy got caught amid shelling and gunfire on Baghdad’s outskirts as it fled toward Syria. At least five people were injured.
U.S. military officials said initial field reports showed no allied forces operating in that area, west of Baghdad. But a reporter for Russian TV who was in the convoy said it appeared the caravan had driven into the middle of a fierce firefight between U.S. and Iraqi troops.
About 20 miles southeast of the capital, in Salman Pak, U.S. Marines discovered an old passenger jet and speculated that it was used for hijacking practice. They also found a full obstacle course at the camp, which Hussein’s regime has said was used for anti-terrorism training for Iraqi special forces.
In a surprise move, the United States began airlifting hundreds of members of an Iraqi exile group into the southern Iraq city of Nasiriyah–lead elements of what the Pentagon said would form the basis of a new Iraqi army.
The exile group members arrived as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said it probably will take the United States more than six months to cede power in postwar Iraq, first to an Iraqi-led civilian authority and eventually to a permanent representative government.
U.S. soldiers evacuated an Iraqi military compound after tests by a mobile laboratory confirmed evidence of sarin nerve gas found at an agricultural warehouse and a military compound, according to a Knight Ridder reporter embedded with the soldiers.
Earlier, more than a dozen soldiers of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division were sent for chemical weapons decontamination after they exhibited symptoms of possible exposure to nerve agents. A Knight Ridder reporter, a CNN cameraman and two Iraqi prisoners of war also were hosed down with water and bleach.
The evacuation of dozens of soldiers Sunday night followed a day of tests for the nerve agent that came back positive, then negative. Additional tests Sunday night by an Army mobile nuclear, biological and chemical detection laboratory confirmed the existence of sarin.
Pentagon and Central Command officials said they had no information on the report of chemicals found.
In the holy Shiite city of Karbala, the 101st Airborne won a lopsided two-day battle in the crowded neighborhoods against Iraqi paramilitary forces. An estimated 400 Hussein loyalists were killed, military officials said, while one U.S. soldier was killed and seven others wounded.
NBC News correspondent David Bloom, one of the network’s most prominent young stars and a near-constant television presence reporting from the Iraqi desert, died from an apparent blood clot. The 39-year-old co-anchor of the weekend “Today” show was about 25 miles south of Baghdad and was packing gear early in the morning when he collapsed.
U.S. military officials disclosed that they had attacked the country house of Iraq Gen. Ali Hassan Majid, known as “Chemical Ali” for his alleged role in gassing Iraqi Kurds in 1988. The attack in the southern town of Al Berghisiah was based on information that he had entered the house, but only the body of Majid’s bodyguard was found.
Allied commanders said they could not say whether Majid had been killed, and Iraqi government officials denied it. “As to Chemical Ali himself, I think time will tell,” U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks said at a news conference at Central Command headquarters in Qatar.
Despite the continued fighting on Baghdad’s outskirts, U.S. officials declared the city 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,” Pace said.
Brooks said attacks by the Army’s 5th Corps on the city’s west and the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force from the east continue “to isolate Baghdad, denying any reinforcements or any escape by regime military forces.”
The Marine attack on the training camp southeast of Baghdad in Salman Pak was prompted by “information that had been gained by coalition forces from some foreign fighters we encountered from other countries, not Iraq,” Brooks said. “We believe that this camp had been used to train these foreign fighters in terror tactics. It is now destroyed.”
The Salman Pak raid, which also destroyed a small number of tanks and armored personnel carriers, is just one of a number of examples where such training centers have been found in Iraq, according to Brooks.
“It reinforces the likelihood of links between his regime and external terrorist organizations, clear links with common interests,” he said, alluding to the Bush administration’s efforts to link Iraq to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network.
U.S. commanders have been reluctant to give precise numbers on Iraqi soldiers killed in battles.
But Brooks said that based on “the amount of force that was encountered [and] the types of systems that were involved in the action,” the U.S. sweep through southwestern Baghdad on Saturday killed “on the order of 2,000.”
“Frankly,” he added, “if we are going to be honorable about our warfare, we are not out there trying to count up bodies.”
