Troops Reach Baghdad’s Airport

U.S. forces reached Saddam Hussein International Airport on the edge of Baghdad early today and positioned themselves to fight for it, commanders said.

The Americans would begin the fight “at a time of our choice,” Capt. Frank Thorp told reporters at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Doha, Qatar. Correspondents traveling with forward units of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division said its troops were within six miles of the Iraqi capital.

A Pentagon official said U.S. forces would “lay siege” to Baghdad by surrounding it, taking control of its airport and seizing its bridges -- then try to break the Hussein regime without breaking the will of the majority of Baghdad residents or destroying their resources.

The advance to the Baghdad airport came after the infantry punched through one division of Hussein’s Republican Guard south of Baghdad on Wednesday and Marines said they had destroyed another division to the southeast.

The Marines pushed ever closer to Baghdad from the southeast, expecting to clash with Republican Guard reinforcements moving their way. Military officials described the Iraqi units as disjointed, chaotic and lacking cohesion as a fighting force.

But the Iraqis put up some resistance. An F/A-18 Hornet jet-fighter and a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter were shot down Wednesday, military officials said. Rescue teams searched for the jet pilot. The Pentagon said seven died on the helicopter and four were injured, but Central Command said only six people were on board, and it had no confirmation of casualties.

The U.S. advances in the 2-week-old war were significant because they brought the United States and Britain closer to the battle for Baghdad -- and the fight to oust Hussein and disarm his nation.

But the breakthroughs also meant that allied forces had penetrated the “red line” that is Baghdad’s defensive perimeter, beyond which fighting is expected to be furious and U.S. commanders said Hussein might unleash chemical and biological weapons.

In Baghdad, a government official read a statement on Hussein’s behalf for the second straight day Wednesday, urging the Iraqi people to rise up and defeat the allies. “They are criminals, aggressors,” the statement said. Hussein did not appear.

Information Minister Mohammed Said Sahaf denounced allied reports from the battlefield as lies and insisted that Iraqi forces had pushed back “U.S. and British mercenaries” in southern Iraq.

In a broadcast from Baghdad, the pan-Arab satellite television station Al Jazeera said a U.S. missile struck a Red Crescent maternity hospital in a residential area of the capital, killing several people and wounding 25.

Central Command said it was reviewing target data for air missions at the time of the attack.

About 100 miles southeast of Baghdad, near the city of Al Kut, units of the 1st Marine Division crossed a key bridge Wednesday over the Tigris River in a thundering assault against the Baghdad Division of the Republican Guard.

By midafternoon, the Marines said they had broken the guard division as an effective fighting force and cut off its retreat.

“The Baghdad Division has been destroyed,” Army Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks told reporters at Central Command headquarters.

The Marines gained control of Route 6, which cuts northwest toward Baghdad, and flanked Al Kut, sidestepping Iraqi soldiers and paramilitary fighters inside the city.

At sundown, the countryside echoed with sporadic artillery fire as the Marines mopped up the last of the Baghdad Division and halted any attempt it might make to retreat toward the capital.

Cobra helicopters hovered at the horizon, attacking pockets of Iraqi fighters.

“We’ve blocked the door to Baghdad,” said Col. Joseph Dowdy of the Marine’s 1st Regiment. He said the Baghdad Division had been rendered “isolated and irrelevant.”

Dowdy said his fighters rounded up scores of Iraqi prisoners, including one identified as an officer. But he said U.S. troops were finding “more empty uniforms” than Iraqi soldiers.

‘We’re on the Attack’

As the mop-up wound down, a bumper-to-bumper convoy of heavy artillery, armored personnel carriers, tanks and troops rumbled north, past wheat fields, mud huts, skinny cattle and sheep.

“We’re on the attack,” Dowdy said. “We will continue the attack until it’s over.”

The Marines sidestepped Al Kut because commanders decided it was too hostile and might slow them down.

They stopped cars, trucks and buses fleeing the city and sent them back into town. They searched a busload of men but found no weapons. Instead, the Marines said, many of the passengers were carrying large amounts of money, perhaps their life savings.

On the western prong of the attack, U.S. officials said the Medina Division had been decimated and that resistance proved light and sporadic in an area that had long been considered a barrier in the campaign against the capital.

Intelligence reports said the Medina’s 2nd and 14th brigades were “rendered ineffective.”

The burned and blasted wreckage of Iraqi military vehicles littered the sides of Route 9 just east of Karbala.

The Iraqi government said U.S. helicopters had earlier attacked a residential area in Hillah, about 30 miles east of Karbala, with heavy loss of life. Roland Huguenin-Benjamin, an official of the International Red Cross, reached the city and expressed shock at what he saw.

“We’ve been overwhelmed by the large number of civilian casualties brought in during the last 48 hours,” he told a CNN reporter by telephone. “There are lots and lots of dead bodies, many of them dismembered.”

Al Jazeera quoted medical sources at a hospital in nearby Haidariyeh as saying 33 people had been killed and more than 300 wounded. It was impossible to verify the civilian casualties. Central Command said it was investigating.

At a crossing of the Euphrates River along Route 9, the Army 1st Brigade defused explosives attached to a bridge, and advancing nightfall and blowing dust slowed the 3rd Infantry at the river.

Drivers used night-vision goggles to keep track of infrared markers on the vehicles ahead.

In a rural area along the route, an Iraqi approached a line of U.S. tanks and asked for a ride. In halting English, he told the tank commander he needed to visit his dying sister in a hospital and that U.S. soldiers had shot up his car earlier in the morning. He was turned away.

Jittery about civilians who might be suicide bombers, the commander of “Cyclone” Company of the 4th Battalion, 64th Armored Regiment, called for warnings to be broadcast in Arabic telling residents to stay away from the advancing convoy.

The warnings seemed to work. Residents scurried for cover. Some dropped live chickens they were carrying. Although the Medina and Baghdad divisions of the Republican Guard were reduced to what one military official in Washington called a third of their strength, U.S. commanders considered four other guard divisions somewhat intact.

Ultimately, they said, allied troops would face Hussein’s Special Republican Guard and Special Security Organization in Baghdad. It was not clear what damage two weeks of airstrikes had done to the Special Republican Guard, a light infantry force estimated to have started the war with 15,000 troops.

The Special Security Organization is a paramilitary force estimated at 6,000 to 8,000 troops.

“We are planning for a very difficult fight ahead in Baghdad,” Army Maj. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, vice director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon.

The remaining Republican Guard forces, better trained and equipped than Iraq’s regular army, were “arrayed for a defense on the southern side of Baghdad ... and on the flanks as well,” McChrystal said.

“Whether they intend to defend in place or just delay is just not clear.”

He said it also was unclear whether the Iraqi forces closer to and inside Baghdad had any of the chemical and biological weapons that the United States has said Hussein is hiding and whether they would use them.

“Their ability to use chemical and biological weapons -- they’ve proven it historically,” McChrystal said. “We believe they have the capability now. Clearly, as we threaten the core of the regime ... we believe that the likelihood of using those weapons goes up.”

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told reporters, after briefing members of Congress on the war, that there are “dangerous days ahead.”

Asked if evidence of Iraqi chemical or biological weapons had been found, Rumsfeld said, “We keep seeing chatter in intelligence channels about the possibility.”

“Gen. [Tommy] Franks [head of Central Command] has thoughts about a way to dissuade and deter further use of chemical weapons, but we’ll leave that to the future.”

Rumsfeld did not elaborate.

One official at the Pentagon said that a siege of Baghdad is likely but that its aim would be to break the will of the regime -- not of the majority of the residents.

“This will not be Vicksburg,” the official said, referring to a nearly two-month siege of the city in Mississippi during the Civil War. “It’s not Sherman’s march to the sea.

“We do not want to destroy the people’s resources, and we don’t want to break their will. We will surround the city, and Gen. Franks will take the city on his terms and on his schedule.”

The official said U.S. forces would seize the Baghdad airport and take control of bridges on the outskirts and just inside the city, which is bisected by the Tigris River.

At the same time, he said, U.S. forces would depend largely on a psychological-operations campaign to persuade residents to revolt against Hussein’s regime or surrender to allied troops.

Troops of the Army’s 4th Infantry Division, arriving in Kuwait at the rate of between 500 and 800 soldiers a day, would be prepared to join in the fight in mid-May, the official said.

He said a smaller advance unit could be ready within 10 days.

Pummeled in the North

In the north, Iraqi troops retreated and dug in atop a ridge guarding a strategic road into Mosul, the country’s third-largest city.

Their withdrawal was the latest in a series of tactical retreats as the Iraqis pull back closer to Mosul and the oil-rich city of Kirkuk.

The soldiers, mainly young draftees, had been hit by wave after wave of bombing, including B-52 strikes. Even after Wednesday evening’s withdrawal, the shock wave of bombs blasting Iraqi positions rattled windows in Irbil, at least 20 miles away.

Unlike in southern and central Iraq, attacks along the northern front, separating Iraqi forces and anti-Hussein Kurdish fighters, are coming mainly from the air.

A few thousand U.S. regular troops and Special Forces are not enough for a massive ground offensive.

But the U.S. forces are working with Kurdish fighters, known as the peshmerga, to coordinate airstrikes. And as the Iraqis retreat, the Kurds take more territory, often without firing a shot.

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Mohan reported with the 3rd Infantry Division and Perry with the 1st Marine Division. Times staff writers Paul Watson in northern Iraq; Tyler Marshall, Tracy Wilkinson and Jailan Zayan in Doha; and Esther Schrader in Washington contributed to this report.

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Casualties

*--* Military totals (as of 5 p.m. Pacific time)

U.S Britain Iraq Killed 49 27 unknown

Missing 16 0 unknown

Captured 7 0 4,500

*--*

Civilian totals

* Iraq has said at least 650 civilians have been killed. Two British journalists, an Australian journalist and an Iranian journalist also have died.

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