Posted on 04/08/2003 5:33:30 PM PDT by RJCogburn
American forces waged an aggressive assault on the symbols of Saddam Hussein's rule in Baghdad today, expanding their grip inside the city and pressing inward from the periphery with Army and Marine units.
Bombs and rockets rained on government buildings in the heart of the Iraqi capital in daylight today, setting afire the Planning Ministry and the Information Ministry. Baath Party and Republican Guard headquarters in the city also came under attack as the growing American force moved to demolish the state's organs of control.
Units of the First Marine Expeditionary Force attacked across the Diyala River southeast of the city center, destroying a number of Iraqi T-55 tanks and other vehicles before capturing the Rashid air base, which will become a base for Marine operations.
In a striking symbol of the American presence in the city, two Abrams tanks churned onto the central Jumhuriya bridge over the Tigris River early today, slowly wheeled their turrets and fired into a building on east bank of the river in response to small arms and rocket fire.
"There is now almost an entire armored brigade from the U.S. Third Infantry Division in the middle of Baghdad," Maj. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal said at the Pentagon today.
"That is extraordinary," said General McChrystal, vice director for operations at the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "The endgame is the end of the regime, and that's a lot closer now than it was."
An Iraqi force tried to mount a counterattack with trucks and buses full of soldiers against American troops holding a strategic intersection in western Baghdad near the Tigris River. United States officials estimated that at least 50 Iraqi fighters were killed and two American soldiers were wounded.
As the military tightened its hold on the capital, a senior member of the civilian team that will establish a government for postwar Iraq led a convoy of vehicles across the border from Kuwait into southern Iraq. Buck Walters, a retired general who is a member of the group headed by another retired general, Jay Garner, crossed into Iraq with a group of diplomats and technicians, but they did not venture as far as Basra, which is still considered insecure.
Although the United States is preparing to take the lead in setting up a civilian administration in Iraq, President Bush said today that the United Nations would play a "vital role" in reconstruction and humanitarian relief after the shooting stops.
Brent Scowcroft, who was national security adviser for President Bush's father, entered the debate on the planning for postwar Iraq today. He warned in a speech in Oslo that the United States and Britain could provoke a backlash in the Arab world, including a surge in anti-American terrorism, if they insist on a dominant role in running Iraq.
American forces, responding to what officials said was sniper fire from two buildings housing journalists in Baghdad, attacked from land and air, leaving three journalists dead.
Al Jazeera, the Arab satellite television channel based in Qatar, said a missile fired by an American airplane killed Tariq Ayoub, 35, a Jordanian reporter who arrived in Baghdad just days ago. The station's chairman, Sheikh Hamad bin Thamer al Thani, said tonight that the location of its Baghdad office was well known to the Pentagon.
A tank fired at the Palestine Hotel in central Baghdad, where scores of foreign journalists are stationed, killed two journalists. A Reuters cameraman, Taras Protsyuk, 35, a Ukrainian citizen based in Warsaw, died when the room where he was working was hit by the tank shell. Three other employees of the news agency were wounded. José Couso, 37, a cameraman for Telecinco, a Spanish television station, died of injuries received in the attack.
Central Command said ground commanders said their units had taken "significant" fire from both buildings, an assertion that was vigorously challenged by witnesses at the scene.
"This coalition does not target journalists," said Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, the military spokesman for the Central Command in Qatar. "And so anything that has happened as a result of our fire or other fires would always be considered as an accident."
General Brooks said the incidents were under investigation.
The Iraqi information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, appeared at the hotel shortly after the shelling and claimed that the Iraqis were defeating the heavily armored Americans and driving them from the city.
"They are going to surrender or be burned in their tanks," Mr. Sahaf said.
American forces were active near Karbala, where members of the 101st Airborne Division sought out members of the Fedayeen militia and paramilitary forces.
To the east, at the town of Al Amarah near the Iranian border, a Marine task force moved to confront the Iraqi 10th Armored Division, one of the few Iraqi military units thought to retain some effectiveness. But the Iraqi division apparently dissolved in the face of allied air attacks and the advancing Marines.
"Right now, there is no enemy that we know of," said Marine Lt. Col. Glenn Starnes, an artillery officer.
North of Baghdad, where the United States has a thin presence bolstered by Kurdish fighters, there was a noticeable drop in enemy activity. A slow-motion airlift of armored vehicles was under way, and commanders expressed hope that the Iraqis were not massing for an attack on an American force that now numbers at most about 2,000 soldiers.
An A-10 "Warthog" ground attack airplane was shot down near Baghdad's international airport today by an Iraqi surface-to-air missile, Central Command announced. The pilot bailed out and was quickly recovered.
Late tonight, Central Command announced that a two American pilots were missing in Iraq after their F-15E Strike Eagle went down in Iraq on Sunday evening. The airmen and their aircraft were from the Fourth Fighter Wing at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina.
Officials did not say how the plane was lost, but said search and rescue operations are under way.
Despite the loss of the two aircraft, officials at the Pentagon declared that the American-led air forces now owned all of the airspace above Iraq.
"Coalition air forces have established air supremacy over the entire country, which means the enemy is incapable of effective interference with coalition air operations," General McChrystal said.
American military officials here and in Washington said that they were uncertain whether a strike by a B-1 bomber on a Baghdad neighborhood on Monday had killed Saddam Hussein and his two sons. The aircrew of the bomber said they had received an urgent targeting order while in the air west of Baghdad and struck the target within 12 minutes using four 2,000-pound bombs designed to penetrate hardened structures.
President Bush said today he did not know whether the Iraqi leader or his sons survived the attack.
"The only thing I know is that he is losing power," the president said at a news conference in Ulster after a meeting with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain. "The grip I used to describe that Saddam had around the throats of the Iraqi people are loosening. I can't tell you if all 10 fingers are off their throats, but finger by finger, it's coming off."
Mr. Bush added: "Saddam Hussein will be gone. It might have been yesterday."
General McChrystal gave a more military view of the strike.
"What we have for battle damage assessment right now is essentially a hole in the ground, a site of destruction where we wanted it to be, where we believed high-value targets were," he said. "We do not have hard battle damage assessment on exactly what individual or individuals were on site."
Central Command officials said that American forces were not operating in the Mansour neighborhood of Baghdad where regime leaders live and congregate, and thus it would be some time before they could ascertain who was in the building and who might have been killed. Iraqi authorities and neighbors said as many as 14 civilians were killed in the attack and scores wounded.
A team of chemical weapons experts was expected to arrive tonight at an empty military training camp near Karbala to inspect several drums that preliminary tests indicated may contain nerve agents and mustard gas. The drums were discovered on Sunday. There have been several false alarms raised about possible chemical or biological weapons, but military officers on the scene were taking no chances.
The Pentagon has been eager to find such material to prove that Mr. Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, one of the main reasons cited for waging war to overthrow his government.
British military authorities were closer to declaring Basra pacified, although troops still patrolled in full military gear. In several other cities in the British sector, soldiers have discarded their helmets and begun wearing their regimental berets.
Their chief problem now is looting and general lawlessness, according to a British military spokesman at the army's divisional headquarters at Zubayr.
The Pentagon today made available the pilot and weapons officer of the B-1 bomber that carried out the attack on the building where intelligence sources indicated Mr. Hussein and his two sons, Uday and Qusay, were on Monday.
They said they were patrolling west of the city with a bomb bay loaded with two dozen 2,000-pound bombs, waiting for instructions. They had just refueled when they were instructed to head for a "priority target" in central Baghdad.
"When we got the word that it was a priority leadership target," said Lt. Col. Fred Swann, the senior weapons officer, "immediately, you know, you get kind of an adrenaline rush, the crew does, but then you fall back to your original training that says, `Hey, let's get the job done.' And we knew we had to react quickly to it."
The crew double-checked the coordinates and plane was over the target in 12 minutes, unleashing two bombs that pierced the roof of the building, followed by two more bombs equipped with 25-millisecond fuse delays, which allow the explosives to penetrate deep into the target before exploding.
"At the time, for me, what I was thinking was, `Well, you know, this could be the big one. Let's make sure we get it right,' " Colonel Swann said.
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