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Politics : Stop the War! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Just_Observing who wrote (2139)	3/23/2003 10:40:28 PM
From: Ron	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21614

Dawning of war's harsh reality From Tim Reid and Roland Watson in Washington # Iraqis parade captured Americans on television # British forces hit by guerrilla tactics in towns THE optimism of the early hours of the war in Iraq gave way to sombre reflection yesterday as British and American forces suffered jolt after jolt in their advance towards Baghdad. Dead and captured soldiers were paraded on Iraqi television, the official allied death toll rose to at least 34, and fighter jets and helicopters were lost. The bodies of four American soldiers, whom the Pentagon said had probably been executed, were shown on Iraqi televison, their half-stripped corpses strewn on the floor in pools of blood. At least two had head wounds. Five other American soldiers were shown being questioned. Two of them, including a woman, appeared injured. The images were not shown on American television, but word of the Iraqi broadcast brought home to the American public the fact that the conflict would be neither quick nor bloodless. President Bush braced the nation for worse to come, saying the coalition forces were “at the beginning of a tough fight”. Answering questions for the first time since hostilities began, he said: “It’s important to realise that this war has just begun.” Brigadier General Vincent Brooks, of US Central Command, said that about ten US Marines had been killed in a faked surrender by Iraqi forces outside al-Nasiriyah. In a separate engagement in the area, Iraqi forces ambushed an army supply convoy and 12 soldiers were missing. It is believed that these were the troops shown on television. American chiefs said that the footage breached the Geneva Convention, and Mr Bush said that anyone harming the prisoners would be treated as a war criminal. Downing Street asked British broadcasters not to show the pictures, saying that would help the Iraqi regime. Tony Blair’s spokesman said the Government was also contacting the Arab al-Jazeera station, which was showing the footage almost non-stop, and other Arab media to make the same point. The images were nevertheless broadcast on BBC News 24 and Sky, and ITN showed still photographs. Allied morale was further dented when an RAF Tornado was shot down by a US Patriot missile — the war’s first fatal “friendly fire” incident — and when a Muslim member of the US 101st Airborne Division launched threw grenades at fellow soldiers, killing one and injuring 16 in northern Kuwait. The human cost of war overshadowed the limited advances made by coalition forces on what one American general described as the “toughest day of resistance”. Across southern Iraq, US and British forces had to battle harder than they had in the opening days of the war. Around of al-Nasariya, 5,000 US Marines were fighting 500 Iraqis for control of a strategic point along the Euphrates. US officials played down the significance of such resistance, saying it was to be expected, but it was sharply different from the widespread surrenders in the early stages of the 1991 Gulf War. The pattern pointed to an Iraqi battle plan that was prepared to cede large swaths of desert to advancing coalition columns while reserving resistance for urban areas. “We let them go for a walk in the desert, but all our towns will resist,” the Iraqi Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan said. British and American officials declined to say how close their infantry forces were to Baghdad, but some units have reached Najaf, 100 miles south of the capital. Military chiefs are concerned that the closer they are to Baghdad, the more likely Iraqi forces are to deploy chemical or biological weapons that are believed to be in the hands of Republican Guard units around the city. Those fears increased with the US Intelligence conclusion that Saddam survived the cruise missile strike on his hideout last Thursday.