U.S. Makes Some Gains, Suffers Setbacks
Al Jazeera Airs Footage of POWs, Dead Soldiers
U.S. Army soldiers in occupied southern Iraq evacuate a Marine wounded in combat with Iraqi forces in Nasiriyah to a military hospital in Camp Udairi, Kuwait. (Romeo Gacad - AFP)
www.washingtonpost.com
By Peter Baker, Thomas W. Lippman and Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, March 23, 2003; 7:46 PM
Iraqi forces ambushed U.S. troops moving toward Baghdad today, inflicting the largest number of U.S. casualties of the four-day-old war and capturing at least five soldiers who were displayed on television in graphic footage that also showed dead U.S. soldiers.
U.S. officials said the American soldiers shown in the video were captured in fierce fighting around Nasiriyah, a strategic city that straddles the Euphrates in southern Iraq. Against a backdrop of artillery fire and screaming jet planes, U.S. Marines there captured two bridges that U.S. officials considered critical in their drive to cross the Euphrates River and capture Baghdad.
The Arab satellite television network al Jazeera showed Iraqi television footage of a group of soldiers in Iraqi custody who appeared to be Americans, including a woman, and the bodies of others, including another woman. Pentagon officials said all were alive when captured.
"We don't know all the details yet," President Bush told reporters as he returned to the White House from the Camp David presidential retreat. "We do know that we expect them to be treated humanely just like we are treating the prisoners of theirs that we capture humanely."
The prisoners shown in the video were from a supply convoy that was ambushed near Nasiriyah, U.S. officials said. The troops who were captured were not Marines but soldiers from an Army maintenance unit. A U.S. television reporter accompanying troops in Nasiriyah said the soldiers apparently drove through the town, realized they had strayed into an unsecured area, and were confronted by Iraqi troops when they turned back.
One sequence of the video shown on al Jazeera showed gruesome images of dead soldiers lying on the floor of a room the announcer said was a morgue. Two of them appeared to have been shot in the head, although they had multiple wounds so the cause of their death could be open to question. The clothing of the soldiers was in disarray. Another clip showed five Americans, including a woman, under interrogation by Iraqis.
The Iraqis asked the prisoner their names and home towns, and such questions as "Why did you come here?" and "Why do you fight Iraqis?"
Throughout today there has been bad news for the United States and Britain, its chief ally in the campaign to destroy the regime of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. Some bad news was self-inflicted, including an announcement that a British warplane was shot down by a U.S. Patriot anti-missile battery. Early in the day, a soldier in the U.S. 101st Airborne Division was taken into custody after a grenade attack on his comrades at Camp Pennsylvania in Kuwait. Army Capt. Christopher Scott Seifert, 27, died in the assault, which injured 15 others.
Heavy fighting also broke out in areas of southern Iraq thought to have been secured.
"It's the toughest day of resistance that we've had thus far," said U.S. Army General John Abizaid at a news conference at the U.S. Central Command headquarters in Qatar. "We understand that there may be other tough days ahead of us but the outcome is still certain."
U.S.-led forces also made new advances today. Overnight, four U.S. military cargo planes carrying several hundred Special Forces troops landed at an airstrip in Kurdish-held north in advance of a new front in the ground war, Kurdish officials said. And sporadic air assaults on Baghdad continued.
The capture of the eastern bridges in Nasiriyah was a major step in the U.S. war plan. In today's battle, Iraqi regular army units pounded approaching Marines with tanks, artillery and mortars in an effort to retain control of the bridges. Separate militia or paramilitary squadrons dressed in black also sniped at the U.S. troops with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, while Iraqis pretending to surrender ambushed a pair of Marines.
U.S. officials said "less than 10" Americans were killed today, but estimates of U.S. casualties changed throughout the day. "It's probably the heaviest fighting we've had, or some of the heaviest fighting," said Lt. Col. George Smith, a top officer at the Camp Commando base in Kuwait. But Smith played down the strategic significance of the day's fighting. "We'd always planned for them to fight. They're just demonstrating that they're fighting."
The six-hour firefight ended after the Marines called in a devastating air armada, including F/A-18 Hornet fighter jets, AV-8 Harrier warplanes, A-10 Warthog tank killers and AH-1 Cobra attack helicopters. "We had the full package," said Lt. Col. David Pere, the senior watch officer at the Marines' command center. "We had everything. We had fixed-wing, we had rotary and we had direct fire."
The Marines reported destroying 10 T-55 tanks as well as an artillery battery and an anti-aircraft gun belonging to Iraq's 51st Infantry Division, which had been deemed one of the country's weaker units by U.S. analysts before the war. Marine officers made no estimate of enemy casualties.
While the Marines and Army pushed closer to Baghdad, U.S. and British forces struggled to pacify areas they previously seized back in south eastern Iraq near the Kuwaiti border. Fierce fighting erupted again in Umm Qasr, the Persian Gulf port that Marine officers have declared "secured" twice already, and around Basra, the country's second-largest city. British forces reported taking Iraq's naval base at Zubair about 20 miles north of Umm Qasr.
U.S. and British commanders said that while regular army units were not posing much threat any more in the south, paramilitary forces called Saddam's Fedayeen were mounting a relentless series of generally small-scale attacks to keep the coalition forces on their heels. The fighters sometimes dressed in civilian clothes to fool American troops and were fighting like "fanatics," several officers said.
"What we're finding throughout the area is small groups of determined men, probably Fedayeen, loyalists, fanatics, who are in a limited way fighting in quite a determined manner," said Lt. Col. Jamie Martin, the chief British liaison at Marine headquarters. "They're a nuisance rather than a significant threat, but they're a nuisance to soft-skinned logistics vehicles and the like."
Even a team of six Marine public affairs officers and lawyers sent to investigate Saturday's disappearance of three British journalists near Basra were ambushed today and two were injured. While normally not combatants, the Marines grabbed their weapons and returned fire, Marines said.
British forces concentrated their attention on Basra, a once-thriving city of 1 million on the Shatt-al-Arab waterway that saw the brunt of Hussein's war with Iran and never recovered.
British troops and U.S. Marines are facing defiant defenders holding out with Soviet-made tanks and artillery positioned deep in Basra's heavily-populated civilian areas. This tactic of moving heavy weapons into residential areas, long anticipated for the defense of Baghdad, has slowed what was expected to be a quick takeover of Basra, Iraq's second-largest city. British troops of the Royal Fusiliers and Queen's Lancers said they had been ordered not to fire on civilian areas without a clear view of their targets.
The thud of artillery and the rapid crack of automatic weapons fire could be heard all day from the center of town. The Iraqis holding out in the city are remnants of the 51st Infantry Division, which British defense minister Geoff Hoon said Saturday had given up and stopped fighting.
The power and water in Basra were turned out by Iraqi authorities on Saturday, British officers said. British troops moved to a point just overlooking the Basra airport, but did not move to take the facility because it remains in range of artillery from the city.
West of Basra, smoke continued to rise from nine or ten oil wells apparently set ablaze by the Iraqis. Rumsfeld told CNN that firefighting crews will arrive there within 48 hours.
In concert with U.S. strategy, British commanders want to avoid a full-fledged battle for the city. Instead, the British forces engaged in fighting with Iraqi troops outside the city while positioning themselves to block Basra from the south and west, thus protecting the flank of the Marines as they advance toward Baghdad. "We're blocking anything coming out of it but we're not actually venturing into it," Martin said
Martin said the regular army forces showed little desire to fight. "The Iraqi troops are just disappearing," he said. "It would appear their belief is if they're in civilian clothes and unarmed they won't be taken prisoner." He added their theory was correct.
As a result, he said the British were hopeful of entering Basra by invitation and then setting to work quickly dealing with any humanitarian needs. "The regular army do not wish to fight and the local population appear to be very receptive to coalition forces," he said. "They're coming out of their houses-it's not quite flowers down the tank barrels, but they are responsive, they don't fear us as hostile."
In Baghdad, television cameras recorded a bizarre spectacle: Iraqi militiamen firing into the Tigris River, in response to an al-Jazeera report that two U.S. pilots had parachuted into the river. As civilian traffic, including city busses, passed undisturbed on a nearby bridge, the Iraqis blazed away at the water, while excited civilians thrashed through reeds on the bank, searching for the Americans.
U.S. officials said no planes were downed anywhere near Baghdad and no crew members missing.
British military officials confirmed that a U.S. Patriot anti-missile rocket downed a British Royal Air Force Tornado GR4 fighter-bomber, killing the plane's two man crew, who were returning to an airbase in Kuwait after a mission over Iraq. British officials said they have not determined why the incident occurred and whether it an American error that was responsible. Officials said it was possible that the Tornado, which had a two-man crew, may have failed to emit an encrypted signal that would have informed U.S. forces that it was an allied aircraft.
On the least visible front of the war, in western Iraq where no journalists are "embedded" with the U.S. Special Forces who parachuted in and took control of two airfields, Myers said the troops "found a huge arms cache, millions of rounds of ammunition and some documentation that needs to be exploited."
This was "some papers" that will be examined by units looking for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, he said. "We have people set up to do that very, very quickly, because it might save thousands of lives if we can find out exactly where and what they have."
The most significant action was the battle at Nasiriyah in south-central Iraq. The U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division had pushed through the area on Saturday, seizing a bridge west of the city, and then continued heading along the road to Baghdad. The Marines' Task Force Tarawa then followed in today to take control from the Army and set their eyes on two bridges in the eastern side of Nasiriyah.
The two bridges lay along the same road in sequence, the southern one spanning the Euphrates and the northern one the Saddam Canal. The bridges are crucial to moving U.S. forces north of the Euphrates in order to give them the ability to threaten Baghdad. U.S. commanders had been convinced that Iraqis might destroy the bridges rather than let the Americans take them but they did not.
Marine commanders here at their base were excited about the capture of the bridges despite the tough fight because they represent a top military objective before the approach to Baghdad. "Now we have . . . routes to take the whole MEF to Baghdad," said Pere, referring to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.
In anticipation of that, U.S. aircraft began pounding Republican Guard units defending the southern and eastern approaches to Baghdad, namely the Baghdad Division, the Al Nida Division and the Medina Division. The warplanes were also concentrating on a regular army unit, the 10th Armored Division, based around Amarah north of Basra.
The fighting at Nasiriyah and a firefight at the port of Umm Qasr, along with an artillery attack against units of the 3rd Infantry Division in south central Iraq, confirmed the expectations of U.S. officials that the war would become more difficult as time passes.
"Clearly they are not a beaten force," Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on ABC's "This Week." "And those who think this is going to go on for some time are right. The hardest part is yet to come."
"I suspect there will continue to be sporadic firefights from some dead-enders who don't want to give up," Rumsfeld said on CNN. He said the only result of that would be more unnecessary deaths and possibly a brief extension of war whose outcome the Iraqis are powerless to affect.
Correspondents Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Susan Glasser, Karl Vick and Dan Williams contributed to this story. |
