US pounds Baghdad, defends war plans
( 2003-03-31 08:04 ) (7 )

Iraqi civilians take cover as the column of people fleeing Basra in southern Iraq and members of Britain's 1st Battalion Number 2 Company the Irish Guards come under small arms fire at a checkpoint from Iraqi positions within the city March 30, 2003. Basra, home to around 1.5 million people, has been bombed by fighter planes and come under shell fire since US and British troops invaded Iraq 11 days ago to topple Saddam Hussein.[Reuters]

US aircraft applied relentless pressure on Iraqi positions in and around Baghdad on Sunday causing fierce fires in the city, as US military leaders fended off growing criticism of their war plans and insisted the campaign was still on course.

Faced with much stronger than expected opposition from regular and irregular forces loyal to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, US troops dug in south of Baghdad, apparently in no rush to assault the Iraqi capital until air strikes and artillery had ground down its defenders.

Round-the-clock air strikes hammered Baghdad as the US military sought to break the elite Republican Guard units entrenched in the sprawling city's outskirts.

With casualties mounting, three US troops were killed and a fourth was injured when a Marine helicopter crashed in southern Iraq. A US spokesman said the helicopter was not brought down by hostile fire but provided no further details.

The US military said 15 troops were injured on Sunday when a truck driven by a man wearing civilian clothes drove into a group of soldiers just outside a US military base in Kuwait. The motives of the attacker, who was shot and wounded, were unclear but the incident followed a suicide attack inside Iraq on Saturday in which four US soldiers died.

As night fell on the 11th day of a war aimed at ousting Saddam, a huge fire raged close to the city center after several massive explosions rocked the city. One struck close to the Iraqi Information Ministry.

IRAQ: 'WAR GOING WELL'

Still, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz said the war was going very well for Iraq and US and British predictions of an easy victory had been proved false.

"They are surprised that the Iraqi people are resisting them courageously with a great determination to deter them. We are not surprised, we expected that, we said that," he said in a television interview aired by the BBC.

In Washington, the US military said it had bombed the main training site for Iraqi Fedayeen paramilitary forces in eastern Baghdad, a presidential palace, an intelligence complex and surface-to-air missile sites.

In other developments, British Royal Marine commandos captured an Iraqi general and killed another senior officer in clashes with Iraqi paramilitary units south of Basra on Sunday, a British military spokesman said.

But a British military spokeswoman said the operation came at a price.

"We have suffered a number of casualties throughout the day in fighting around Basra. One soldier has been killed and a number yet to be determined have been wounded," she said.

British troops have still not tried to capture the southern city of 1.5 million, where more than a week of fighting has disrupted food and electricity supplies and forced many civilians to flee the city.

President Bush, backed by Britain, launched the war to overthrow Saddam after saying he had refused to give up chemical and biological weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. Iraq said it has no such weapons and none has so far been found, although invading forces have found several thousand chemical warfare suits in captured Iraqi positions.

CASUALTY FIGURES

Iraq said on Sunday its military had destroyed two US or British tanks and nine armored personnel carriers over the past 24 hours and shot down five unmanned drone reconnaissance planes. There was no immediate British or American reaction.

The United States has lost at least 39 dead and 104 injured with 17 listed as missing since the war began. Britain has lost 24 dead.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri, in a letter to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, said 420 Iraqi civilians had died and at least 4,000 were wounded since the start of the war.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld rejected criticism that he had launched the war with insufficient ground strength, but he predicted that Iraqi resistance would stiffen even more as US troops approached Baghdad.

Some US leaders and advocates of the war had predicted that many Iraqi units would not fight and that US troops would be welcomed as liberators. But such rosy scenarios have not for the most part come to pass.

Rumsfeld, facing scrutiny over his influence on a war plan that involves far fewer troops than the number used in the 1991 Gulf War, flatly denied reports that he had rejected advice from Pentagon planners for substantially more men and armor.

"That is not true," Rumsfeld said. "I think you'll find that if you ask anyone who's been involved in the process from the Central Command that every single thing they've requested has in fact happened."

Gen. Richard Myers, head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the campaign was going according to plan, with US and British forces already in control of 40 percent of Iraq, but he gave a clear signal that there would be no swift ground assault on the Iraqi capital.

The aim before going in, he said, was to isolate the Iraqi leadership and cut it off from the rest of the country.

"We're not going to do anything before we're ready," Myers said. "We're certainly not going to do anything to put our young men and women in danger precipitously. We're also not going to put Iraqi civilians in danger as well. We'll be patient. We'll just continue to draw the noose tighter and tighter."

An Iraqi military spokesman, hailing Saturday's suicide bomb that killed four US troops, said 4,000 willing "martyrs" from across the Arab world were already in Baghdad to fight.

Radical Palestinian group Islamic Jihad said it had sent would-be suicide bombers to Baghdad to help Iraqis fight US and British troops and planned to send more.

(Reuters)