Republican Guard units remain intact

United Press International ^ | 4-6-03

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Apr 06, 2003 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- Having penetrated Baghdad and neutralized its most potent defenders, U.S. troops Sunday were still facing intact Republican Guard troops north of the city and scattered irregulars who wielded control inside.

Coalition planes dropped thousands of leaflets on the city, imploring citizens to stay inside their homes.

U.S. officials told MSNBC that a large group of Republican Guard had communicated their willingness to surrender, but whether they were part of the force to the north was not known.

MSNBC also reported that in the north of the country a U.S. warplane may have mistakenly bombed a U.S. Special Forces position, killing many soldiers including a Kurdish leader and injuring a BBC reporter.

More explosions had been heard in Baghdad earlier Sunday, several hours after a column of about 30 tanks and armored vehicles made a brief Saturday foray into the center of Iraq's capital, killing more than 2,000 defenders in the process.

U.S. forces, Army on one side of the city and Marines on the other, continued to be reinforced and the newly captured suburban airport was the center of a widening circle of U.S. control.

Iraqi irregulars were reported patrolling Baghdad streets in the absence of regular army or Republican Guard troops whom the U.S. Central Command officials said had been obliterated in the city.

Iraqi television warned citizens, thousands of whom have fled beyond Baghdad's outskirts, that no longer will anyone be allowed to come in or out in the evening or overnight. It was not immediately clear what the warning would accomplish, if anything, since coalition forces were extending their own control over routes of entry, at least to the southwest and southeast.

Fifteen miles south of the city an active daytime firefight was reported with a force of unknown size. MSNBC's Gary Scurka reported he was watching the fighting that originated at a checkpoint and in the background could be heard the sounds of sporadic fire of a U.S. grenade launcher nearby.

About one hundred miles to the south, U.S. weapons experts dressed in chemical protection suits and carrying sophisticated sensors examined an enormous cache of Iraqi weaponry, from land mines to artillery shells, said to be enough to support a division-sized force.

Coalition forces conducted Saturday's incursion into Baghdad to "send a message," said Maj. Gen. Victor Renuart at a CentCom briefing in Doha, Qatar.

"It was a clear statement of the ability of coalition forces to move at the time and place of their choosing," Renuart said. But he insisted Operation Iraqi Freedom was "far from finished in Baghdad."

The U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division, backed by some 20 Abrams tanks and 10 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, raided Baghdad from the south. The 1st Marine Expeditionary Force arrived from the southeast.

Outside Baghdad, columns of reinforcements stretched back toward Kuwait and additional U.S. forces continued flowing into the country.

CentCom said coalition warplanes Saturday struck the home of Ali Hassan al-Majeed, nicknamed "Chemical Ali" for allegedly using poison gas on tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds in 1988 citizens during an uprising.

Military officials declined to give an assessment of the attack other than to say they believe al-Majeed was present during the attack and that his primary bodyguard was killed.

The Russian Interfax news agency reported the Russian ambassador to Iraq left Baghdad Sunday with a group of embassy employees, heading for Damascus, Syria.

A dozen others remained behind to keep the embassy operating.

On the southeastern edge of Baghdad Saturday, United Press International's Rick Tomkins reported steady artillery fire directed deeper into the city as helicopter gunships and planes bombed and attacked. The 5th Marines regiment cut through Iraq's al Nida division, eliminating another bulwark of Baghdad's defenses, U.S. officials said.

Coalition warplanes are now flying over Baghdad round the clock, providing close air support for advancing troops and targeting the remnants of the Iraq Republican Guards, U.S. officials said.

U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. T. Michael Moseley said Saturday that Republican Guards outside the capital Baghdad are "dead," following intense bombardment.

"I will tell you up front that our sensors show that the preponderance of the Republican Guard divisions that are outside Baghdad are now dead," Moseley told reporters in a conference call at the Pentagon.

"We have laid on these people," he said. "I found it interesting when folks say we are softening them up. We are not softening them up, we are killing them."

British soldiers, meanwhile, found hundreds of skulls and other human remains at an abandoned Iraqi military base.

The remains were found in labeled plastic bags and unsealed hardboard coffins at the base near al-Zubayr in southern Iraq. The British Broadcasting Corp. reported that most of the corpses appeared to have died from gunshot wounds to the head. They asked local authorities to arrange proper Muslim burials.

Several Iraqis told the BBC that they were the remains of Iraqi soldiers killed in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, recently returned from Tehran.

At Baghdad's international airport, captured by U.S. troops Friday, soldiers worked to secure their hold on the facility.

"That does not mean that there is not a threat from artillery from enemy forces who have continued to attack throughout the course of today to varying degrees and varying sizes but with no success," Renuart said.

"The airport gives us a fairly substantial area to operate from, and I believe we will continue to operate from that field. Whether we make it a main base of operation or not, time will tell."

He said at least one of the damaged airport runways will be functional "very rapidly" and that the rest of the facility's infrastructure appears to be intact.

But Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf said Saturday Iraqi forces repulsed coalition forces and had regained control of the airport.

"Today, we slaughtered the force which dared and was at the runaway of the airport. Now they are outside the faraway airport fence," al-Sahhaf told reporters in Baghdad. "The heroic Republican Guards are now in control of the airport's land in full." Later in the day he repeated the assertions to al Jazeera television.

He also said coalition forces had not entered Baghdad. "You can go and visit those places ... nothing there at all."Centcom spokesman Frank Thorp said.

"At this point we're not trying to capture any territory," Thorp said. "This is an effort to move through the heart of the city and destroy any opposition forces we see."

Also Saturday, Iraqi state television broadcast more pictures of Saddam and his two sons. But there was no way to know when or where the video was shot.

The U.S. Postal Service chartered two cargo planes to help deliver more than 750,000 pounds of mail per week to soldiers stationed in the war zone. Since the start of the war, mail volume to Kuwait has increased from 21,000 pounds per week in October, the Postal Service said Saturday.

Early Saturday the Pentagon confirmed fears that the unit comrades of rescued maintenance company Pfc. Jessica Lynch had been killed. Eight of the 11 bodies discovered at the hospital from which she was extricated Tuesday were identified as those of U.S. soldiers. All had previously been listed as missing in action.

Also early Saturday, two Marine pilots were killed in the crash of their "Super Cobra" helicopter in central Iraq, apparently the result of some mechanical problem, not hostile fire.

By early Saturday, the Pentagon was listing 75 U.S. soldiers dead in or around Iraq so far, 62 of them the result of hostile fire.

(Reported by Martin Walker in Camp Doha, Kuwait; Richard Tomkins with the 5th Marines at Baghdad; Ghassan al-Kadi in Baghdad, Iraq; Pamela Hess at the Pentagon and William M. Reilly at the United Nations)