Posted on 03/28/2003 9:35:27 AM PST by kattracks
US hits telecoms in Baghdad, ground advance pauses
By Khaled Yacoub Oweis
BAGHDAD, March 28 (Reuters) - The United States blasted communications centres in Baghdad on Friday in some of the heaviest air strikes of the Iraq war, but advancing U.S. ground troops appeared to pause to regroup and strengthen supply lines.
Playing on U.S. and British fears of being sucked into bloody street battles, especially in a capital heavily defended by elite Republican Guards, Iraq swore to fight on and promised "living hell" for the invaders.
After a night of fire and thunder, Reuters correspondent Nadim Ladki saw two damaged communications centres in the city. One big building had been struck at its base. A tangled pile of smouldering rubble was all that was left of a smaller facility.
Many telephone lines were knocked out.
Defiant Iraqis converged on mosques for Friday prayers, enraged rather than cowed by the U.S. bombardment.
"You can see and hear the missiles and bombs raining down on us and yet Muslims are coming to the house of God to pray," said the preacher at the "Mother of All Battles" Mosque.
Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf said overnight raids on the capital had killed seven civilians and wounded 92.
Witnesses said eight more people were killed when a Baghdad office of the ruling Baath Party was demolished in a later raid.
Sahaf also said U.S. forces had cluster bombed the Shi'ite shrine city of Najaf, killing 26 civilians and wounding 60.
In the ground war, an American officer said U.S. forces had battled around 1,500 Iraqis overnight near Najaf, 160 km (100 miles) south of the capital, but he had no word on casualties.
Reuters reporter Luke Baker, near Najaf, said U.S. forces had used tanks and heavy artillery. "The battle raged for a few hours. It finished about 3 a.m. (midnight GMT)," Baker said.
Sahaf said Iraqi forces had destroyed 33 tanks and armoured vehicles and killed four invaders in the area. The United States reported four Marines missing near Nassiriya to the south.
AID SHIP DOCKS
Reuters correspondents with U.S. units, some of which have raced to as little as 80 km (50 miles) from Baghdad, said the columns seemed in no hurry to get closer than that for now.
Officers said they needed to bring fresh stocks of food, fuel and ammunition down the long supply lines from Kuwait.
But Britain's Army chief, Mike Jackson, dismissed suggestions the campaign had become bogged down.
"Armies cannot keep moving forever without stopping from time to time to regroup, to ensure their supplies are up," he told a London news conference. "It's a pause while people get sorted out for what comes next."
After chaotic scenes of Iraqis struggling to grab sparse supplies of food and water, the first humanitarian aid ship docked in the southern port of Umm Qasr.
The Sir Galahad, a British naval supply vessel carrying 200 tonnes of food, medicine, blankets and water, arrived after days of delay while mines were cleared from the waterway.
The shipment is part of an aid flow planned by London and Washington to show their foe is Saddam, not his people.
Gritty Iraqi resistance to U.S. and British forces who want to be seen as liberators, not invaders, has doused expectations of a swift victory. Iraqi leaders have vowed to fight street by street to defend Baghdad, even if it is soon surrounded.
Such a fight, a key element of Iraq's defence plan, would dilute much of the U.S. military's overwhelming technological superiority and cause high civilian and military casualties.
The United States ordered 100,000 more troops to the Gulf, but Sahaf said U.S. forces faced a bleak fate with or without reinforcements. "Iraq, with its weapons, its people and its territory, will become a living hell for the invaders," he said.
A British defence source said U.S.-led forces lacked the "overwhelming force" needed to wage street battles in Baghdad, and military experts polled in London, Paris and Moscow agreed.
"The allied strategy is to hold things as they attack the (four Republican Guard) divisions by air...and try to degrade them but not actually go into Baghdad," said Michael Clarke of the International Policy Institute at King's College, London.
Many thousands of Muslims protested against the war around the world. "Death to America!" and "Long live Iraq," shouted protesters in Gaza. Egyptian demonstrators called on Iraqis to wage holy war against the invading U.S. and British forces.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, an outspoken opponent of the war, said it had pushed the world into its most serious crisis since the Cold War.
With investors worried about the impact of a protracted conflict on the global economy, oil prices touched their highest since the war began, stocks fell and gold rose $2 an ounce.
BASRA CIVILIANS UNDER FIRE
Britain said Iraqi forces had fired mortars and machineguns at about 2,000 civilians fleeing fighting and deprivation in the besieged southern city of Basra, forcing some to turn back.
In what appeared to be a similar but separate incident on the main road south out of Basra, Iraqi forces fired mortar bombs near some 1,000 civilians waiting to cross a bridge, seriously hurting one woman, a British officer in Basra said.
In northern Iraq, jubilant Kurdish fighters poured over one frontline near the town of Chamchamal after Iraqi troops withdrew towards the oil city of Kirkuk, leaving five bodies in a bunker. U.S. planes have often bombed the Iraqi lines.
More U.S. troops arrived in the north overnight, advancing plans to open a new front against Baghdad.
Reuters journalist Soheil Afdjei saw four transport helicopters, up to 60 vehicles and about 150 troops at the Harir airstrip, a day after 1,000 paratroopers secured it.
Turkey's refusal to let 62,000 U.S. troops and heavy armour move across its soil to Iraq forced the Pentagon to rethink its original war plans, which had envisaged attacking Saddam's power bases in Baghdad and Tikrit from the north as well as the south. The United States and Britain launched the war to overthrow Saddam and rid Iraq of alleged weapons of mass destruction. Iraq denies it has any, and none has yet been found.
U.S. military leaders said on Friday Iraq may have told its forces to be ready to use chemical weapons at some point, but said they were not aware that any such orders had been given.
03/28/03 12:28 ET
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