http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=540&ncid=736&e=4&u=/ap/20030324/ap_on_re_mi_ea/war_rdp
Allies Hit Setbacks on Road to Baghdad
27 minutes ago
By CALVIN WOODWARD, Associated Press Writer
Iraq (news - web sites) used ambushes and even fake surrenders to
kill and capture U.S. troops Sunday, inflicting the first
significant casualties on the allied forces driving toward Baghdad.
U.S. war leaders declared the invasion on target despite the bloody
setbacks.
Up to nine Marines died and a dozen U.S. soldiers were taken
prisoner in surprise engagements with Iraqis at An Nasiriyah, a
southern city far from the forward positions of the allied
force.
On the third day of the ground war, any expectation that Iraqi
defenders would simply fold was gone.
"Clearly they are not a beaten force," said Gen. Richard Myers,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "This is going to get a lot
harder."
Even so, the U.S.-British coalition fought to within 100 miles of
Baghdad and tended to a growing northern front.
And at the end of a day filled with plenty of bad news for allied
forces, U.S. officials said troops had made what could be an
important discovery: a suspected chemical factory near the city of
Najaf. Authorities were trying to determine whether the facility
was involved in making chemical weapons, U.S. officials said.
Baghdad came under heavy air attack early Monday, even as a mosque
blared "Allahu Akbar" and "Thanks be to God," perhaps to boost
morale.
On Sunday, allied soldiers came under attack in a series of ruses,
U.S. officials said, with one group of Iraqis waving the white flag
of surrender, then opening up with artillery fire; another group
appearing to welcome coalition troops but then attacking
them.
Lt. Gen. John Abizaid of U.S. Central Command said a faked
surrender near An Nasiriyah, a crossing point over the Euphrates
River northwest of Basra, set off the "sharpest engagement of the
war thus far." Up to nine Marines died before the Americans
prevailed, he said.
Twelve U.S. soldiers were missing and presumed captured by Iraqis
in an ambush on an army supply convoy at An Nasiriyah, Central
Command said.
"We, of course, will be much more cautious in the way that we view
the battlefield as a result of some of these incidents," Abizaid
said.
Some of the missing prisoners were from Fort Bliss, Texas, said
Jean Offutt, an Army spokeswoman at the base, where families
members gathered Sunday night.
"The mood, of course, is very tragic," she said.
U.S. and British officials said some of the stiffest resistance was
coming from paramilitary guerrillas known as the Fedayeen Saddam
and from Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s personal security
forces.
"These are men who know that they will have no role in the building
of a new Iraq and they have no future," said Peter Wall, chief of
staff to the British military contingent in the U.S.-led
coalition.
President Bush (news - web sites) kept his eye on the big prize
the removal of Saddam's government and Iraq's eventual
disarmament.
"I know that Saddam Hussein is losing control of his country," Bush
said upon his return from the Camp David retreat in Maryland. "We
are slowly but surely achieving our objective." He demanded that
U.S. prisoners of war be treated humanely.
With allies closing in, Iraqi leaders appealed for a united Arab
front to condemn the invasion but knew they wouldn't get it. "There
is no hope in these rulers," Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin
Ramadan said.
But Russia and Chinese foreign ministers reasserted their view that
the invasion has no legal basis and asked for an immediate
halt.
The State Department, for its part, protested that Russian
companies sold sensitive military equipment to Iraq in the run-up
to the war, maintaining some of the equipment could pose a direct
threat to coalition forces.
Arab television showed what it said were four American dead in an
Iraqi morgue and at least five other Americans identified as
captured soldiers.
"I come to shoot only if I am shot at," said one prisoner, who said
he was from Kansas. Asked why he was fighting Iraqis, he replied:
"They don't bother me; I don't bother them."
Also, a British warplane was shot down in a friendly fire attack by
U.S. Patriot missiles, killing its crew of two, and a grenade
attack in an Army base in Kuwait left a captain dead and a U.S.
soldier as the suspect.
In the most notable gain for the coalition, soldiers of the 3rd
Infantry Division's 2nd Brigade moved 230 miles in 40 hours,
killing scores of Iraqi militiamen who engaged them with machine
guns, to take positions less than a day's journey from
Baghdad.
The brigade raced day and night across rugged desert in more than
70 tanks and 60 Bradley fighting vehicles. No American injuries
were reported in that battle.
Iraqi Defense Minister Lt. Gen. Sultan Hashim Ahmed expressed
confidence his troops can hold the capital.
"If they want to take Baghdad they will have to pay a heavy price,"
he said.
Several other allied units engaged in intensive gunbattles Sunday.
In southern Iraq, a soldier from the 3rd Infantry Division died in
a vehicle accident.
Efforts intensified to assemble forces in northern Iraq, where air
strikes have gone after radicals linked to the al-Qaida terrorist
network but prospects for ground assaults have been limited because
neighboring Turkey balked on becoming a staging ground.
In Kuwait, U.S. officials investigated the attack at the 101st
Airborne Division's command center, where an assailant threw
grenades into three tents. Three of the wounded were seriously
injured; Capt. Christopher Scott Seifert, 27, died.
The accidental downing of the British plane was another blow. The
Tornado GR4, based in Marham, Britain, was returning from an
operational mission early Sunday and was engaged by the missile
battery, British officials said.
It was the third aerial accident involving British personnel since
the war began. Six British troops and a U.S. Navy (news - web
sites) officer died when two British helicopters collided, while
eight British and four U.S. Marines were killed when their
helicopter crashed near the Kuwait-Iraqi border.
Near the Persian Gulf, Marines seized an Iraqi naval base Sunday
morning at Az Zubayr. In the command center, Marines found
half-eaten bowls of rice and other still-warm food.
Near Basra in the south, Marines saw hundreds of Iraqi men
apparently soldiers who had taken off their uniforms walking
along a highway with bundles on their backs past burned-out Iraqi
tanks.
Allied forces have captured Basra's airport and a bridge. But
commanders say they are in no rush to storm the city, hoping
instead that Iraqi defenders decide to give up.
Although Iraq was getting little help diplomatically, many in the
Muslim world expressed anger about the war.
Anti-war protests continued in many cities around the world, one of
the biggest in Pakistan. Children in Lahore chanted anti-American
slogans and other demonstrators carried portraits of Osama bin
Laden (news - web sites) and Saddam as more than 100,000 people
joined in a peaceful rally.
