Key Section of City Is Taken in a Street-by-Street Fight

One of Mr. Sahhaf's top officials, a man who has frequently sought to intimidate Western reporters, was seen in the parking lot of the Palestine Hotel in tears, embracing another official as if for courage.

Gotta say this sentence brought a smile to my face. :-)

Doin' the 'happy-happy joy-joy' dance myself!
:-)

This will greatly distress the top folks at the NYT.

"It's Time to Pony Up".

Donate Here By Secure Server

Or mail checks to
FreeRepublic , LLC
PO BOX 9771
FRESNO, CA 93794

or you can use

PayPal at Jimrob@psnw.com

STOP BY AND BUMP THE FUNDRAISER THREAD-

Full article -

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 8 - The battle for the heart of Baghdad began before dawn within the sprawling gardens of Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace and tapered off by early afternoon with the Americans in control of an area running perhaps two miles along the Tigris's western embankment and a mile or more back from the river.
American tanks moving out of the northern end of the presidential compound into the city's open streets fired repeatedly in the direction of the Information Ministry and the Iraqi broadcasting headquarters, and came under heavy rocket, machine-gun and mortar fire in return.
Progress was halting, but the sector under American control by evening included many of the buildings considered to have been at the heart of Saddam Hussein's power: several of his palaces, at least six ministries, the main Baghdad railway station, the Al Rashid hotel, the Parliament building, the government's main conference center, and the principal government broadcasting headquarters, beside the Information Ministry near the river.
Iraqi state television fell silent and the daily statement from the Iraqi information minister describing all the advances claimed by American forces as fantasy and lies changed to a vow to "pummel the invaders."There were clear signs that Mr. Hussein's grip on power was crumbling.
Until the breakout by the Americans today, it had been possible to believe, if only just, that the Iraqi minister, Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, might not be whistling Dixie, in his accustomed way, when he predicted that the Americans would be slaughtered in a massive Iraqi counterattack.
Today, his credibility disintegrated entirely.
One of Mr. Sahhaf's top officials, a man who has frequently sought to intimidate Western reporters, was seen in the parking lot of the Palestine Hotel in tears, embracing another official as if for courage.
In the streets for miles around the hotel, the only armed men to be seen were clumps of exhausted, distracted-looking militiamen, slumped in battered armchairs, rifles set aside, drawing heavily on cigarettes.
If there is to be a last-ditch fight by the Republican Guard, Mr. Hussein's vaunted troops, or by fanatical irregular forces, the men in black tank suits who are the most feared of the Iraqi leader's enforcers, they were nowhere to be seen.
It was not clear if Mr. Hussein himself was alive. His personal fate remained uncertain as Iraqi rescue teams worked through the day to dig into the rubble of several upscale homes in the Mansur district of west Baghdad that were obliterated by an American bombing attack on Monday afternoon that American commanders said was intended to kill the Iraqi leader.
Rescue workers pulling at the rubble in a crater 60 feet deep told reporters that they believed as many as 14 people had been killed in the attack, but responded with blank stares and agitated gestures when they were asked if the victims might have included Mr. Hussein.
As dusk fell, the area held by the Americans fell silent, suggesting that Iraqi resistance - fought relentlessly but ultimately hopelessly with rockets, machine guns and other light arms - had died away.
The American advance was secured in street-by-street battles with tanks and other armored vehicles; a foothold in Saddam Hussein's main presidential compound on the Tigris River was transformed into a bastion of several square miles.
Dogs ran wild in every neighborhood, perhaps abandoned by their owners as they fled for the countryside. Whipping winds toward the late afternoon added to the air of desolation, pulling at mounting piles of garbage on sidewalks and sending some of the refuse rolling like tumbleweed down the empty streets. Gas stations, with long waits only days ago, were virtually abandoned, too.
Hospitals were islands of frantic activity, as cars and pickup trucks joined ambulances in rushing injured civilians to casualty units that were overwhelmed.
The toll on Iraqis appeared to have been severe.Senior officials at the Palestine Hotel on the river's eastern bank, where most international journalists are lodged, were seen clutching each other in distress, whether from concern about their personal safety or about the pounding being taken by Iraqi forces could not be known.
The American advance was supported by a lone A-10 Warthog tankbuster plane that dived repeatedly through clouds of black smoke from oil fires lighted around the city in the last two weeks in a bid to hinder American bombing.
The plane appeared to be loosing heavy volleys of large-caliber cannon rounds at Iraqi positions ahead of and around the tanks. Bursts of fire and smoke exploded in the battle zone, and some fires continued burning for hours.
Later, an A-10 was shot down near Baghdad's international airport by an Iraqi surface-to-air missile, Central Command announced. The pilot bailed out and was quickly recovered. It was not clear if this was the same plane.
Independent estimates of casualties among American and Iraqi troops, or of damage to buildings in the area, were unavailable as all four bridges in the center of the city leading from the Tigris's eastern bank were blocked by the fighting, and all city telephones in Baghdad went out under American bombing last week.
The American gains in west Baghdad were matched by similar American progress in the southeast of the city, where Marines supported by Apache helicopters seized control of the Al Rashid military base, about three miles from the point where the eastern bank of the Tigris faces the Republican Palace on the west.
Coupled with American advances into north Baghdad, this appeared to place American commanders in a position to mount a pincers movement that could give them control far sooner than some commanders had predicted of both sides of the river in central Baghdad, presenting the Iraqis with the loss of the core of their capital city barely three weeks after the war began.
At least three, and possibly all four of the central bridges connecting the relatively open terrain of the government quarter in west Baghdad to the densely-populated business and residential districts of east Baghdad, home to many of this city's 4.5 million people, appeared to be under effective American control.
American tanks advanced part-way across the bridges to a point where they could fire at will at any Iraqis approaching the bridges from the eastern end, where what is left of Mr. Hussein's once-consuming power now resides.
Iraqi casualties appeared to be heavy. Reporters visiting only one of the city's major hospitals, the Al Kindi in east Baghdad, were told by doctors that the battle for control of the government quarter had brought in between 200 and 300 civilian casualties, among them 35 dead.
On a bloodied gurney inside, a 50-year-old man who gave his name as Talib said that he had been selling cigarettes from a hand cart in Al Alawi Square, near the city's main bus station about a mile from the Tigris, when he was hit by shrapnel from an American tank round.
Left alone by doctors who appeared to have judged his injuries not to be life-threatening, the man let out repeated roars of pain, saying he had been hit in the back. "Is this Bush's promised `liberation'?" he shouted.
Daubing the white tiles of the wall beside him with his blood, he added: "No this is a red liberation, a liberation written in blood. Bush said he would disarm Saddam, and look how he's doing it now - killing us, one by one. Please ask him, how do you liberate people by killing them?"
One man in a green hospital smock, apparently despairing at the sight of newly arriving dead and wounded, threw a punch at a French photographer, striking her only lightly but unbalancing himself and falling to the ground. Other medical staff hurriedly urged the newsmen to leave, fearing, they said, that more serious injury could be done to them if they lingered.
The heavy bombing on Monday aimed at killing Mr. Hussein had a profound psychological effect on the city. Workers gathered around the wreckage of a restaurant adjoining the crater left by the bomb, the Al Sa'ah, on 14th of Ramadan Street, seemed at a loss when asked who had been killed in the bombing. The restaurant was a favorite of the Iraqi political elite, with its black marbled facade and fast-food kebabs.
On Tuesday morning, Iraqi state television had failed to broadcast a regular morning news bulletin, and showed instead only old footage of Mr. Hussein receiving popular adulation at rallies.
Shortly after 11 a.m., amid the rage of battle around the broadcast center, television screens went blank, and the state radio went off the air.
Iraqi drivers for some senior officials said they had fled the Palestine and an adjoining hotel and headed out into the Iraqi hinterland by the one exit road apparently not yet blocked by American forces: north-eastward toward the Iranian border.
The growing dominance of American forces became clear toward evening when two F-18 Hornets came high out of the milky sun of the late afternoon, launching missile after missile at a 15-storey building on the Tigris River's eastern bank that has served as a sniper's nest for Iraqi fighters firing at American tanks on the opposite bank.
Their target, caramel yellow with black trim, and arched upper windows that served perfectly all day as a launch pad for the rockets and machine guns and mortars the Iraqis rained on the Americans, was the Board of Youth and Sports, a totemic stronghold of Mr. Hussein s older son, Uday.
This made the attack deeply symbolic, since Uday, 38, has used his father s power to proclaim himself the czar of Iraqi sports - with the malevolent twist that several of the sports buildings he controls, according to Iraqis and countless Western human rights reports, have been used as centers for torturing all who vex the younger Mr. Hussein.
These unfortunates, Iraqis say, have ranged from losing members of the national soccer team to anyone who whispers criticism of Mr. Hussein the father or Mr. Hussein, the firstborn son.
How Iraqis will respond when the Iraqi ruler and his sons are finally toppled will be central to the judgments history makes of the war, and perhaps a foretaste came on the fifth or sixth run of one of the F-18's.
A missile was fired from low altitude and struck a bulls-eye on the building's southern facade, at about the 10th floor, setting off a fireball leaping into the sky, followed by a plume of thick black smoke.
An Iraqi man of about 30, wearing a track suit and watching from a window on an upper floor of the Sheraton Hotel a mile down the river to the south, leaned out to shout something to two reporters for American publications who had made of their own 12th floor balcony a grandstand seat.
Thumbs up, grinning, the man punched the air, triumphant.
Only in afterthought, perhaps concerned that he might have been overhead by other Iraqis, or perhaps that he might be identified from reports the Americans would write, did he retract - with a scatological outburst about America, but still with the same broad grin.
Until today, American airstrikes had come mostly like thunderbolts, bombs and missiles invisible until impact, the aircraft delivering the bombs so high, so fast, or so enveloped by night that they were phantoms to the people of Baghdad.
No longer. For 30 minutes, the American planes soared and banked and dived, disappearing at one moment into skies turned inky black by the burning oil trenches around Baghdad that have been lit in an attempt to foil American air attacks, returning the next lower, faster, gunmetal gray in the evening sun.

Dogs ran wild in every neighborhood, perhaps abandoned by their owners

Justice: The corpses of our enemies become the meals of dogs.

I guess Black Beret Dude's underlings will soon be whistling Dixie.

I've forgotten - was NYT one of the papers that we are not supposed to post articles from in full because of the court decree, or was it only LAT and WPOST?

It was the WASHPOST AND LAT that was covered by the consent decree against Free Republic. They tried to muscle us out of business and hey we're still here, a perpetual burr under their skin.

There is a thread somewhere that contains the list of sources that must be excerpted and linked under the LAT/WP settlement terms. NYT is not on the list, but other newspapers are, including Newsday, The Baltimore Sun, The Chicago Tribune and several others.

Unfortunately, I can't find that thread. But when you are posting an article and fill in the "Source:" URL, the posting software should check the site and alert you if it must be excerpted.

I'd like to take note that the New York Times is behind the reporter who filed this report, and I quote:

Until the breakout by the Americans today, it had been possible to believe, if only just, that the Iraqi minister, Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, might not be whistling Dixie, in his accustomed way, when he predicted that the Americans would be slaughtered in a massive Iraqi counterattack.

And then the reporter, sitting in a hotel room in Baghdad, wrote his next paragraph about Baghdad Bob -

"Today, his credibility disintegrated entirely."

You mean they thought him credible a few days before? BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Dogs ran wild in every neighborhood, perhaps abandoned by their owners

Has Burns ever been in the Middle East before?
Except for a tiny minority who like to affect Western habits
Arabs don't own dogs.
And it is normal to see packs of wild dogs running through the streets.
(It can be quite dangerous to wander out at night.)

Just reading the headline, I knew this was a Times article. God, they're dull and predictable.

And then the reporter, sitting in a hotel room in Baghdad, wrote his next paragraph about Baghdad Bob - "Today, his credibility disintegrated entirely."

I know - but what gets me is it took the reporter till yesterday to figger that out!

Has Burns ever been in the Middle East before?

You've never heard of John F. Burns?

He is a veteran war correspondent, living and reporting for many years from Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Bosnia and several other places. He was once arrested in China and charged with espionage before being released. He has been awarded two Pulitzer Prizes for his journalism. His most recent work in Iraq has been commended by the likes of Emmett Tyrrell and William Safire.

If he says "Dogs ran wild in every neighborhood, perhaps abandoned by their owners", I believe it.

I think the sentence you refer to is a sign that the thug assigned by Saddam to monitor Burns has disappeared.

April 9, 2003

Key Section of City Is Taken in a Street-by-Street Fight