Posted on 03/23/2003 8:03:18 AM PST by JohnHuang2
Saddam's guerrillas thwart U.S. river crossing
By Sean Maguire
NEAR NASSIRIYA, March 23 (Reuters) - U.S. Marines battled Iraqi guerrillas for control of the southern Iraqi city of Nassiriya on Sunday, taking "significant" casualties in a fight to open a route north to Baghdad, U.S. officers said.
Reuters Correspondent Sean Maguire, travelling with the Marines First Regiment south of the city, said he could see explosions and huge plumes of smoke over Nassiriya, on the Euphrates river about 375 km (225 miles) southeast of Baghdad.
"It looks like artillery, or possibly air strikes," Maguire said. "There's lots of smoke rising."
After nightfall, fires were still burning near the bridges.
U.S. field officers said the Marine battalion spearheading the fight had suffered significant casualties in a battle with irregular guerrilla fighters known as Saddam's Fedayeen.
They gave no details but a CNN television correspondent at Nassiriya quoted eyewitnesses in the battle as saying they had seen at least 10 American bodies around an amphibious assault vehicle that had been hit by a rocket-propelled grenade.
Al-Jazeera television aired Iraqi footage of at least four corpses that appeared to be those of U.S. servicemen and of five U.S. prisoners it said were taken in fighting near Nassiriya.
The firefight with the Fedayeen at Nassiariya blocked an advance by U.S. forces, who had earlier reported securing two key bridgeheads to enable them to cross the Euphrates and strike northwards towards the Iraqi capital.
Maguire said U.S. officers believed the bridgeheads were now secure but that the area in between was not. U.S. troops captured the northern ends of the two bridges in the east of Nassiriya early on Sunday, opening the way for large forces to cross and head north toward the Tigris river and Baghdad.
But units of Saddam's Fedayeen, an irregular militia force of loyalists to President Saddam Hussein, counterattacked.
"They've been fighting all day. They're using guerrilla tactics," one officer said on Sunday evening.
SURRENDER REPORT
Maguire said there was heavy U.S. helicopter traffic over the area, and that hundreds of U.S. military trucks and armoured personnel carriers had stopped their advance.
U.S. officers also said that the 11th Division of the Iraqi army had "capitulated." That report could not be confirmed, and no details on the alleged surrender were available.
Iraqi officials on Saturday denied U.S. statements that the commander of the 51st Division had surrendered and a U.S. commander said his forces had fought and defeated elements of the 51st around the southern city of Basra.
Iraqi Information Minister Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf told a news conference in Baghdad that foreign invaders headed to Nassiriya had been "taught a lesson they will never forget."
"We have placed them in a quagmire from which they can never emerge except dead," he said.
Speeding columns of the U.S. Third Infantry have covered nearly two thirds of the 500 km (300 miles) from the Kuwaiti border in two days before running into Iraqi resistance near Najaf on the southwest bank of the Euphrates.
A strike north across the river towards the Tigris river and Baghdad could create a pincer movement on the capital.
U.S. officers believe units of President Saddam Hussein's elite Republican Guards face them near Najaf -- the Medina Division -- and at other cities south of Baghdad, like Kut on the Tigris, where the Baghdad Division is thought to be based.
Its a German company owned by arabs.
The textbook solution does not include journalists embedded with every other military unit...
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