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Posted on 04/01/2003 6:21:50 PM PST by HAL9000
Rockets lit up a calm, starlit sky early Wednesday, beginning a what was expected to be major battle for the Karbala Gap. This battle was said to determine the fate of the war in Iraq.Troops felt very little resistance as they moved northeast of Karbala, about 50 miles southwest of Baghdad. The 3rd Infantry Division moved 20 miles past its stopping point and has encountered no enemy troops and no dead bodies in the bombed emplacements where the Republican Guard was believed to be.
In Baghdad, huge explosions echoed across the city early Wednesday, and a plume of white smoke was seen rising from the southern end of the old palace grounds in the capital.
More explosions rocked Baghdad in the half hour following the first blast at 3 a.m., including the old palace area. The palace is the ceremonial seat of government on the west bank of the Tigris, one rarely used openly by Saddam.
"This is the big battle," a U.S. military official at Central Command forward headquarters told the Reuters news agency about the battle for the Karbala Gap at 2:15 Iraqi time, when the fighting began.
U.S. forces from the 3rd Infantry Division planned a double-thrust movement, with forces skirting the east and west outskirts of Karbala in an effort to draw troops from the Republican Guard's Medina Division out of their entrenched positions north of the city.
If U.S. troops can control the gap, they will emerge 30 miles from southern Baghdad, setting the stage for a showdown with Saddam Hussein.
Earlier Tuesday, Tomahawk cruise missiles and airstrikes pounded Medina Division positions near Karbala. The Pentagon's top general, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard Myers, said Tuesday the Medina Division had been damaged below 50 percent of its original fighting strength.
The Marines lunged for the Baghdad division near Al Kut, to the southeast of the capital.
If successful, the offensive after a four-day halt in the advance will strip away the outer layer of the capital's defenses and leave only two other Guard divisions standing between Hussein and U.S. forces.
"We continue to tighten the noose around Baghdad," said Lt. Col. George Smith, a planner at Camp Liberty, the Marines' combat headquarters in southern Iraq.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld denied that the United States is negotiating an end to war with Iraq. "The only thing the coalition will discuss with this regime is their unconditional surrender," he said.
Rumsfeld said Saddam Hussein's government had been planting rumors that U.S. officials were talking to Iraqi leaders, with the goal of convincing Iraqi citizens that "the coalition does not intend to finish the job."
The Iraqi government rallied its citizens to fight as both sides braced for what could be the first major clash of the war.
A senior official, appearing on Iraqi television, read a statement that the government said came from Iraqi leader Hussein.
"Hit them, fight them, they are cursed, they are evil," the statement said. "You will be victorious. They will be defeated." The statement also promised that anyone who dies would go to heaven.
Saddam, 65, did not appear personally. Rumors have swirled since the war began 13 days ago that he may have been hurt in a U.S. air attack. He has been seen several times on television but it was unknown when those appearances were recorded.
U.S. planes pounded targets just outside the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk Tuesday, according to the Reuters news agency, in what local Kurdish fighters called the heaviest attack on the strategic oil hub since the start of the war.
Farther south, as the sun set over the Iraqi desert, U.S. troops watched six cruise missiles streak through the sky in the direction of Baghdad and Karbala, where an Iraqi Republican Guard division is dug in to block an advance on the capital.
"It's nice to look up and know that everything up there is friendly," 1st Lt. Eric Hooper of Albany, Ga., told the Associated Press. "It makes you feel a little better about rolling up that way."
Inside Karbala, at least 4,000 Iraqi militiamen and soldiers may be laying in wait, U.S. officers said. And at least 8,000 members of the Republican Guard's Medina division are positioned between Karbala and Baghdad, reportedly in the Karbala Gap, an area between a large reservoir and the Euphrates River.
U.S. troops launched limited strikes Monday in two spots south of Karbala. Lt. Col. Philip DeCamp, a battalion commander, warned that the attacks ahead could be much tougher.
"We need to keep these guys from becoming complacent, thinking they can take anything the Iraqis throw at us," he said.
Iraq has been reinforcing some Republican Guard divisions almost as fast as the coalition attacks wear them down. Because Turkey refused to allow U.S. troops to enter northern Iraq through its territory, Iraq has been able to move Republican Guard units from north of Baghdad to help defend the south.
"That is frustrating a lot of people," a Marine commander said.
So U.S. forces are girding for a three-stage attack: Defeat the Republican Guard divisions ringing the capital, march on the city and then punch inside to hunt down Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
"I don't think the regime is going to collapse," a U.S. intelligence officer said. "We're going to have to capture or kill those guys. You might be able to chop off the head, but the body is going to be twitching."
In northeastern Iraq, U.S. specialists have discovered evidence that a Kurdish Islamic militant group linked to al Qaeda was concocting chemical weapons in the mountains, a U.S. military commander said Tuesday.
A joint U.S.-Kurdish assault last Friday swept the group, Ansar al-Islam, or Partisans of Islam, from the sliver of territory it held. U.S. and Kurdish soldiers are pursuing remnants of the group in snow-bound peaks and cave-dotted ravines on the border with Iran.
Evidence Ansar was making chemical - and possibly biological - weapons was discovered in the ruins of one of its bases.
"We found various documents, equipment, et cetera that would indicate the presence of chemical and/or biological weapons," a U.S. Special Forces battalion commander told reporters in the town of Halabja.
Samples from the site in the mountain hamlet of Sargat were being sent back to the United States "for further study and testing," he said.
A senior Kurdish security official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said U.S. chemical warfare specialists who began combing the site on Saturday had detected traces of ricin, a deadly toxin derived from castor beans.
Overnight, the air attacks hit Baghdad, the Karbala area and also an Iraqi presidential yacht and another ship in the southern port of Basra, military officials said. Bombs hit surface-to-air missile sites and a bridge across the Euphrates River, said a spokesman for the USS Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier.
Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf said 56 people were killed and 268 wounded overnight, including 24 dead in Baghdad and nine children killed in Hilla.
"They are indiscriminately killing people," he said. "Hilla is my hometown. It is a civilian place."
Nearly all the phone lines appeared out in Baghdad after at least five telephone exchanges were bombed. Precision-guided bombs also targeted the the Iraqi National Olympic Committee and the Ministry of Youth. Saddam?s eldest son, Odai, allegedly runs torture chambers there. Human rights activists have accused him of jailing and brutalizing athletes who failed to please him.
On Monday, at least seven Iraqi civilians were killed and two were wounded after ignoring orders to stop at a checkpoint in Najaf. No soldiers were injured in either attack.
A Washingon Post reporter at the scene reported that 10 Iraqis were killed, including five young children. In the first moments after the shooting, an Army captain accused soldiers of not having fired warning shots quickly enough, according to a Post article.
Four Army soldiers died in a suicide car bombing in the same area on Saturday and U.S. troops have been on high alert for additional suicide bombings.
Al-Sahaf strongly criticized the incident and other instances of civilian deaths in the war. "They are becoming more tense and hysterical," he told a Tuesday morning news conference in Baghdad.
A U.S. spokesman said the incident is under investigation.
"We make every effort to warn, to try to cause a halt to the potential danger before it escalates beyond a point at which it can be controlled," U.S. Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks said at a daily briefing at coalition headquarters in Qatar. "We believe that we are still following our procedures well, and in any case when there is a lost of potential non-combatants, investigations begin."
Paratroopers with the 82nd Airborne Division also killed one and wounded three Iraqis on Monday after a white pickup tried crashing into the soldiers at a checkpoint outside Samawah in southern Iraq.
Iraq denied a Pentagon report that members of Saddam?s family may be fleeing the country. "The report is a rumor circulated by the U.S. Defense Department," according to a statement broadcast by Iraqi TV on Tuesday.
On Monday night, Saddam and his sons appeared on Iraqi television, with the station showing video footage of a meeting of top military commanders. There was no way of determining when the video was shot.
In south-central Iraq, Marines secured 40 warehouses that held as much ammunition as the Marine base of Camp Pendleton in California. The Marines found ammunition, rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and other weapons, which will take several days to sort through and dispose.
The unit also destroyed a Baath Party headquarters site in the region, finding AK-47 assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and an anti-aircraft artillery weapon.
Patriot missiles shot down two Iraqi missiles, one fired from south of Baghdad at U.S. forces in central Iraq and the other heading for Kuwait.
In southeast Iraq, two Iraqi soldiers who said they were sent on a suicide attack mission to the country?s largest port have turned themselves in to British troops in the Persian Gulf port of Umm Qasr, the British commander said Tuesday.
"We had two suicide bombers turn themselves in yesterday because they didn't want to be suicide bombers any more," Col. Steve Cox, commander of the Royal Marine Commandos running Umm Qasr, told reporters. "We are accommodating them." The pair had no explosives in their possession when they surrendered, Cox said, adding that they were turned over to British military intelligence for interrogation and would be treated as enemy prisoners of war. He did not give any details about the alleged plans for a suicide attack.
The lights went on overnight in Umm Qasr for the first time since the war started, said Lt. Commander Emma Thomas, a spokeswoman for British forces at coalition headquarters.
There were no significant skirmishes with Saddam supporters in Umm Qasr overnight, a sign that "we have diminished their control in the area," Thomas said.
"We are slowly building our area of influence around Basra," she said. "We now feel we're in control of the entrance and exit points."
The British troops have also set up humanitarian aid distribution sites and encouraged Iraqis to return to their jobs in Umm Qasr's port and other Iraqi institutions.
A plane veered off the USS Constellation's flight deck and slipped into the water during a landing. The two pilots ejected into the water and were rescued. Military officials said the S-3B Viking malfunctioned.
I can only thank God that Algore is not in charge right now....
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Hmmmm. I'd watch my left flank if I were the Third ID. Odds are the Medina division left stay-behinds in the city of Karbala itself.
Once we punch through the approach cities, then all that is left are the Guard divisions in front of Baghdad proper. They can be defeated in detail, battalion by battalion.
Be Seeing You,
Chris
The willing have no intention of a street fight on the way to the Ministry of Information.
Granted the press is trying it's best to scare the American public with this myth but the military has no intention of engaging in such an inefficient military tactic.
While we're on urban myths I'm intrigued by the old "Our marines will feret out the leadership in the vast, interconnected complex of tunnels under Baghdad after we take the city".
Most likely we will simply drop one bunker buster into the center of the river above a subway crossing and then wait for the rats and the generals to surface.
Agreed. There is danger here. The RG, though, has a distinct problem, too... if they shoot, they expose their positions - so they better get a hit the first time quiet often or they are in trouble. Our Air and ground power is so awesome compared to the enemy's. I'm still most concerned about the reports of the russian Kornut anti-armor rocket being available to the Iraqis.
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What the hell is this? This purports to be an article from Knight-Ridder, but it reads like something translated from Ukranian.