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U.S. warplanes strike gathering of 200 Saddam paramilitaries in Basra
18 minutes ago

By NICOLE WINFIELD, Associated Press Writer

CAMP AS SAYLIYAH, Qatar - U.S. warplanes destroyed a two-story building in the besieged Iraqi city of Basra where some 200 Iraqi paramilitary fighters were believed to be meeting Friday, the U.S. military said.

There was no immediate word on casualties from the attack by a pair of F-15E Strike Eagles, targeting units loyal to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) that British officials say have clamped down on a restive population in Basra.

Earlier Friday, the paramilitaries — known as "Saddam's Fedayeen" — fired mortars and machine guns on about 1,000 Iraqi civilians trying to leave Basra, forcing some to retreat back to the southern city, British military officials and witnesses said.

British forces surround the city — Iraq (news - web sites)'s second-largest, with a population of 1.3 million — and want to open the way for badly needed humanitarian aid. But they have yet to move in, facing what would likely by tough street-by-street resistance from the militiamen.

In London, British defense officials said Saturday that a British soldier was missing and believed killed after armored vehicles came under attack in a possible "friendly fire" incident near Basra. Four other soldiers were injured.

The Ministry of Defense said it was investigating reports the soldiers — members of the Household Cavalry Regiment — had been fired on by U.S. warplanes during fighting Friday.

British and American military officials at Central Command in Doha, Qatar, also said they were investigating the incident.

In Friday night's airstrike, the two warplanes fired laser-guided munitions fitted with delayed fuses — meaning they penetrated the building before detonating to minimize the external blast effect. The Central Command statement said a church 300 meters (yards) from the two-story building was undamaged.

The statement did not say how it was known that 200 paramilitaries were holding a meeting.

British military spokesman Col. Chris Vernon said Friday that British forces are "nowhere near" capturing the city.

Basra was "clearly nowhere near yet in our hands," Vernon told Britain's Sky News television. "We have no way at the moment of getting humanitarian aid into Basra."

He said coalition forces have underestimated the level of resistance by loyalist forces and paramilitaries and said Basra's civilians need to be convinced that coalition forces will support them if they revolt against Saddam.

Significant numbers of civilians have reportedly been coming out of Basra every day for the past few days to get food aid from points outside the city and then returning, a senior British defense official said.

More civilians tried to leave Friday, but Iraqi paramilitary forces opened fire on them to block them from leaving, the official said on condition of anonymity.

An initial group of about 1,000 people made it out safely, fleeing to the west of Basra, said Lt. Cmdr. Emma Thomas, a spokeswoman for British forces in the Persian Gulf.

She said the firing started when a second group of about the same size tried to flee the city.

British pool reports described Iraqi forces with mortars mounted in pickup trucks firing on the fleeing civilians. Panicked women and children scattered on a bridge over a canal and down its embankments to avoid machine-gun fire, the reports said.

One Iraqi woman badly wounded by shrapnel was carried into a British vehicle that whisked her off for treatment.

"Here perhaps are the first pieces of evidence of Iraqi people trying to break free from the Baath party regime and the militia," Vernon, the British military spokesman, told Sky News. "And clearly the militia don't want that. They want to keep their population in there, and they fired on them to force them back in."

British troops in the town of Zubayr, near Basra, took over a children's health center that apparently had been converted into an armory by the Iraqi militia and Saddam's Baath Party, according to a reporter with The Scotsman who was with the Black Watch forces.

A 30mm anti-aircraft gun was perched on the roof and boxes of children's medicines were discovered next to rooms packed with rocket propelled grenades, AK47 rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition, the news report said.