American forces on Saturday opened the battle for Baghdad with an audacious display of military power, sending more than 40 tanks and armored vehicles rumbling into the Iraqi capital in an attempt to show Saddam Hussein’s regime that it had no hope of stopping the allied advance.
As they roared through Baghdad’s southwestern quadrant, the tanks wiped out pockets of elite troops and militiamen who fired machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and in some cases anti-aircraft cannons at them. In other areas along the way, commanders said, Iraqi civilians waved and smiled.
The stunning 25-mile sweep from the south suburbs to the international airport in the west left dozens of smoking tanks and artillery emplacements in its wake. But Iraq’s information minister insisted that the Americans had not entered the capital and had lost the city’s airport to an Iraqi counterattack.
“Today the tide has turned,” Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf said. “We are destroying them.”
On Sunday, a Marine battalion overran a Republican Guard headquarters and seized one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces south of Baghdad. Above the embattled capital, U.S. warplanes were flying around the clock, coordinating precision strikes in support of upcoming ground attacks.
U.S. commanders, whose forces have nearly encircled Baghdad, cautioned that tough urban combat may lie ahead before the city falls, but their mood was confident.
Explosions jolted Baghdad early Sunday after a relatively quiet night in which the usual barrages on anti-aircraft fire were not heard.
Marine units advancing from the southeast pushed to within 6 miles of Baghdad on Saturday, quelling fierce opposition along the way. At one point, they fought with bayonets in a marsh on the city’s outskirts.
By the end of the day, U.S. forces had arrayed thousands of troops around the capital, from the airport on the west to the southeastern suburbs. A stream of thousands of Baghdad residents poured out of the city.
Not all the news was positive for the U.S. forces. The Pentagon announced that eight of the bodies recovered during last week’s dramatic rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch from an Iraqi hospital had been identified as American soldiers from her ambushed convoy. One, Pfc. Lori Piestewa, 23, was the first American servicewoman killed in the war.
Two Marine pilots died when their helicopter crashed in central Iraq.
The death toll for allied forces has exceeded 100.
British soldiers in southern Iraq discovered a grisly warehouse where the remains of about 200 people had been stored along with photographs of slain men.
Al Jazeera television quoted an Iraqi official as saying the bodies were those of Iraqis who died in the 1980s war with Iran and had recently been returned.
The Army’s push into Baghdad was swift and deadly. It began around dawn as 29 Abrams tanks and 14 Bradley Fighting Vehicles motored north to a point on the Tigris River about 5 miles from the heart of the capital. They then turned left and drove to the city’s airport, joining up with U.S. forces that captured the facility Friday.
The goal, Maj. Gen. Victor Renuart said at Central Command in Qatar, was to “put a bit of an exclamation point on the fact that coalition troops are in fact in the vicinity of Baghdad, do in fact have the ability to come into the city at places of their choosing and demonstrate to the Iraqi leadership that they do not have control. . . . I think we made that point.”
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In three hours, said Col. David Perkins, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division’s 2nd Brigade, the convoy killed 1,000 Iraqi fighters and destroyed dozens of anti-aircraft batteries. One U.S. tank commander was reported killed.
“We marched through town and knocked on Saddam’s door and said, `We’re here, we’re taking over,”‘ said Capt. Jason Conroy.
Troops described a furious ride through a gantlet of Iraqi fire, coming from rooftops and the back of pickup trucks mounted with heavy machine guns. At least three civilian cars tried to ram vehicles in the column. But in some cases, the troops said, groups of Iraqi soldiers were caught unawares.
One tank was crippled by a rocket-propelled grenade, and the Americans said they destroyed it to keep it out of enemy hands.
The tanks did not try to take and hold territory. Instead, they were sending “a very clear statement to the Iraqi regime that we can move at times and places of our choosing,” Renuart said.
He cautioned that the fight was “far from finished.”
At the airport, American troops were hoping to clear at least one of the runways to allow them to bring more troops and equipment within easy striking range of the capital.
Members of the 3rd Infantry and 101st Airborne divisions still were combing a warren of tunnels beneath the airport and were fighting off sporadic assaults aboveground.
Though Republican Guard units were fighting in spots surrounding the city, Renuart said, “they were more isolated. They were not well-organized.”
He said that was a result of artillery and air strikes against their positions.
But he said there was a possibility that more Republican Guard units were lurking north of Baghdad near Tikrit, Hussein’s hometown.
Militia members on streets
Inside the capital, black-clad members of the Fedayeen Saddam militia appeared on the streets for the first time since the war began. Power was back on in the capital after two days of outages.
There still was no sign of the Iraqi president, but state television showed video of him meeting with his two sons, Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan and several military officials.
The air war began a new phase as jets flew continuously over Baghdad in support of ground forces.
If a pitched battle breaks out in the streets, jets will drop smaller laser-guided bombs and other munitions that are less likely to cause civilian casualties, commanders said.
Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Moseley, head of the air command in the region, said it would be difficult to find and attack Iraqi soldiers and equipment concealed within the city. American commanders repeatedly have said that the Iraqis have parked tanks and artillery near such civilian sites as mosques and hospitals to avert air attacks.
Surveillance planes and drones also will be used target troops within the city.
“It will require patience and discipline,” Moseley said. But, he said: “There’s no way out for these guys.”
In the suburbs, Marines moved from building to building and house to house, hoping to root out guerrillas. They traveled with tanks and armored vehicles to clear their path and with artillery strikes backing them.
Fight for Karbala
Fighting still raged in areas outside Baghdad. The Army’s 2-70th Armor Battalion and parts of the 101st Airborne Division captured about two-thirds of Karbala, a holy city for Shiite Muslims about 60 miles southwest of the capital.
Several tanks engaged Republican Guard troops and paramilitary fighters on the south side of Karbala as airborne units began patrolling some streets and establishing roadblocks. Bradley Fighting Vehicles traded fire with Iraqis shooting rocket-propelled grenades from rooftops.
At one point, Iraqi tanks dueled with American Cobra helicopters twisting and turning in the skies. Within a half-hour, at least a dozen buildings were on fire.
“It was quite an assault,” said Sgt. Kirk Crabtree, 32, a leader of a team of scout troops who patrol areas ahead of the 2-70th. “I don’t think the resistance was anything they couldn’t handle. The [Republican] Guard is already on the run.”
Other troops of the 2-70th began securing an Iraqi military supply bunker just 30 miles outside Baghdad. They found several cases of rocket-propelled grenades and blew them up.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Lt. John Kimball of New York. “I saw underground caverns in there, and I believe we need to search them more thoroughly. You never know what you are going to find in there.”
The fighting took place in temperatures that soared well above 100 degrees. Some soldiers in parts of Iraq peeled off their heavy chemical protection suits, and most were ordered to drink 2 gallons of water daily.
Some troops reported difficulty in getting enough water, mainly because their advance has been so rapid that tank trucks could not keep up.
In the north
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On the northern front, American troops fighting alongside Kurdish forces moved out of the Kurd-controlled region and into no man’s land. The two main cities in the north, Mosul and Kirkuk, are still under the regime’s control, but the Kurdish forces are within 20 miles of each. Heavy bombing was reported in Mosul.
Al-Sahhaf, the information minister, told Al Jazeera that the Kurdish advance was of little significance. “We have different calculations for the northern region. It does not worry us at all,” he said.
Kurdish forces supplemented by U.S. commandos also were reportedly massing in eastern Iraq near the oil city of Khanaqin.
In the far south, warplanes struck the Basra home of Hussein’s cousin Ali Hassan Majid, known as “Chemical Ali” for his use of chemical weapons against the Kurds in the late 1980s. He now is in charge of Iraq’s southern defense.
According to the Pentagon, 79 U.S. soldiers have been killed in combat and accidents since the war began. British forces have lost 27 troops.
No estimates of Iraqi casualties are available, but Renuart said Saturday that some 6,500 Iraqi soldiers were in custody.
On the home front, President Bush praised the military’s successes in his weekly radio address. He also spoke by telephone with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who told Bush that their differences on the war should not prevent them from working on other international issues.