War Roundup: Hundreds Killed As Battle For Baghdad Continues (innumerate press alert!)

UNDATED - Up to 3,000 Iraqi fighters were killed in a show-of-force foray into Baghdad by American armored vehicles, the U.S. Central Command said Sunday.

The command also said it was investigating a report of a friendly fire incident in northern Iraq. According to Kurdish officials, at least 12 people were killed when a U.S. warplane bombed a convoy carrying Kurdish fighters and U.S. special forces.

In southern Iraq, British forces made their deepest push yet into Basra, with a column of 40 armored personnel carriers rolling into the country's second-biggest city after a series of strikes on Saddam Hussein's loyalist defenders.

Though Saturday's 25-mile incursion through an industrial section of southern Baghdad was brief, it inflicted a heavy toll, according to command spokesman Jim Wilkinson. More than three-dozen tanks and armored vehicles were involved; U.S. casualties were described as light.

The blitz took two task forces of the 3rd Infantry Division from the southern outskirts of the city past Baghdad University and near the banks of the Tigris River, then back to the western outskirts of the city to the airport, which is under U.S. control.

The U.S. Central Command said the estimated toll of 2,000 to 3,000 deaths referred to fighters only. Later, asked at a news briefing to explain how the number was calculated, Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks gave no specifics, but said it was a reasonable estimate based on the resistance U.S. column encountered from Republican Guard units and militiamen and the weaponry used in response.

"We know it was a considerable amount of destruction," he said. "In virtually every engagement we have, it's very one-sided."

U.S. officials made clear that forays into Baghdad would continue. Footage of a second one Sunday was shown on CNN.

"It's important to do so to secure the area; it's also important that we do that for psychological reasons," Wilkinson said. "Frankly we've had to prove to the civilians in the north and the south that we're there to stay. Once they know we're there to stay, they celebrate."

U.S. forces have formed a loose circle around Baghdad, seeking to isolate it and block movement of Iraqi troops in and out. Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Join Chiefs of Staff, described the strategy Sunday on ABC's "This Week."

"Baghdad, as you know, is about 15 miles or more east to west and about 15 miles north to south, so to say that you have an impenetrable cordon around the city would be a misstatement," Pace said.

"It is certainly true that we have huge amounts of combat power around the city right now, and that we have over a thousand planes in the air every day. So if it moves on the ground and it takes aggressive action, it's going to get killed."

U.S. pressure in and around Baghdad intensified Sunday. A Marine battalion overran a Republican Guard headquarters and seized one of Saddam's palaces south of the city. Overhead, U.S. warplanes were flying around the clock, coordinating precision strikes in support of upcoming ground attacks.

Iraqi state television broadcast a statement attributed to Saddam, urging soldiers who had been separated from the regular units to join up with any unit they could locate.

In northern Iraq, BBC correspondent John Simpson reported that he was in a convoy of Kurdish and American fighters when it was bombed by a U.S. plane, killing 10 to 12 people. Simpson said he and his translator were injured.

Hoshyar Zebari, an official of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, said at least 12 Kurdish fighters were killed and 45 injured in the bombing. Zebari spoke from a hospital in the Kurdish-controlled city of Irbil, where some of the injured were being treated, including the younger brother of the top Kurdish leader, Masoud Barzani.

In Basra, British forces have set up checkpoints in the city for the first time. Until now, they had stayed on the outskirts, hoping that the predominantly Shiite Muslim populace of Basra would turn against the pro-Saddam militiamen defending Iraq's second-biggest city.

"We are aggressively patrolling, we're moving into the city now," said Group Capt. Al Lockwood, spokesman for British forces.

On Saturday, coalition aircraft struck the Basra home of Ali Hassan al-Majid, the Iraqi general known as "Chemical Ali" for ordering a poison gas attack that killed thousands of Kurds in 1988. Allied officials said the general - Saddam's cousin - was believed to be home at the time, but it was not known whether he was killed or wounded.

On Sunday, coalition forces positively identified the body of the general's bodyguard, Wilkinson said. "They're still sifting through the rubble down there to see if Chemical Ali was dead," he said.

Wilkinson said hundreds of people in the neighborhood began cheering after the strike.

Capitalizing on their dominance of the skies, U.S. commanders began deploying planes over Baghdad 24 hours a day, ready to direct strike aircraft to ground targets. The strike planes use precision bombs that are considered effective against fixed targets while minimizing risk to nearby civilian structures.

Iraqi authorities took Baghdad-based journalists to the city's southern outskirts Sunday to show them a U.S. tank destroyed in the recent fighting. A commander said four more tanks also were destroyed but had been towed away to clear the road.

Along the Tigris River, 20 miles southeast of Baghdad, Marines of the 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines overran the headquarters of the Republican Guard's Second Corps, seized one of Saddam's numerous palaces and destroyed what U.S. intelligence reports depicted as a terrorist training camp.

The nighttime attack was mounted in the town of Salman Pak, which military officials said contained a suspected weapons of mass destruction site dating back to 1991.

Before the battle, Marines had estimated there were between 500 and 2,000 Iraqi soldiers in Salman Pak. At least 13 were killed, the Americans said; others fled from trenches and sandbagged positions on rooftops.

It was unclear what the Marines found at the training camp, which contains an airstrip the Bush administration says was used in terrorist training provided to Islamic militants from other countries.

In Moscow, the Kremlin said a convoy of Russian Embassy diplomats came under fire Sunday, and four or five were wounded, as they were evacuating from Baghdad and driving toward Syria.

The U.S. Central Command said that the attack occurred in territory controlled by the Iraqi government and that no coalition forces were operating in the area.

My reason for posting this good news was to highlight the difference between the headline ("Hundreds killed...") and the text of the item ("Up to 3,000 Iraqi fighters were killed..."). Until now it was my belief that the twisting of numbers so often seen in press reports was merely the left-liberal press "spinning" (a circumlocution for "lying").

Now, with sure proof here that they don't understand the difference between "hundreds" and "thousands," I'm less certain.

(Makes one wonder what they do teach in those journalism schools, beyond "Bush bad, Clinton good.")

You are right to use the word "innumerate", but I'm not sure this is just a deficiency of the liberals. I often see things quantified badly, "dozens" when the things described number 40 or more, and therefore would be more precisely described as "scores", and "decimated" (to reduce by 10%) is only used properly be accident, I'm sure. I'm a bookkeeper, although I have no head for math (bookkeeping is just arithmetic!) and a great example of a person who has their job because of technology, if the electronic calculator hadn't been invented, I'd be doing something else. But I tell you, this verbal imprecision is most annoying.

You're correct, the fault isn't only with the liberals -- and I suspect that the dozens/scores differentiation is lost on 99% of Americans. And very few know about the ancient Roman army practice of "decimation."

But I've too often seen the media "talk down" the size of politically incorrect groups while either accurately reporting or inflating the numbers of those favoured. It was startling to me to see this real error.

Unless there was a whole lot left out of Fox's video of this particular encursion, I'd have to question the "3000" figure also. Most of the hardware destroyed seemed to have been already abandoned.

But, hey. If the Iraqiis can claim to have us surrounded at the airport, I see nothing wrong with us dusting up the numbers a bit. Heck - make it 10,000.

But on TV you're not seeing the results of air strikes. They came to that figure based upon the number of vehicles that were destroyed while occupied and moving, along with counts from the individual infantry platoons.

When you send a burst of machine gun fire into a group of people you don't actually count them - you've got a fair idea of how many of them didn't make it. But when you send a 120mm Abrams main gun round into a crowd, there's nothing left to count. By now, the troops aren't inflating the count - they've become fairly methodical about hunting humans, and these were killed at close enough range that there's little doubt regarding the status of who you just got done dismembering with your last volley. Combine those numbers of KIA with the seriously wounded that won't make it to medical care, and 3,000 is probably LOW.

Since the Iraqis were also using ZSU23-4 AA cannons in ground fire mode, you can also count on a lot of friendly fire casualties for them as well. From the descriptions given by the troops interviewed, I'd bet you even money that the total dead + wounded is >10,000 from the two day incursions.

They shouldn't listen to Baghdad Bob's BS.

"during hostilities the enemies gets killed. This must be grounds for an indepth investigation."

DoughtyOne, you are sooooo right. This is the next sob-story I am waiting to hear. How we killed too many Iraqi Soliders! We're going to hear it too, I gar-UN-tee! as the Cajun Chef used to say.

With all the bombing there were almost no casualites, collaterally. Now that the war is being fought in Baghdad, with resistance, there are casualties. This is something neither the Red Cross or the press can quite figure out. Pathetic.

I dunno. The 3000 figure is achies by the AP here.

Buy my point was not about the actual numbers, it's about there being a world of difference between "hundreds" (title) and "thousands" (article).

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