U.S. Thrust Meant to Send Message

U.S. forces pulled back Saturday after daring strikes into Baghdad that left streets strewn with the wreckage of a withering battle, and Iraqi forces stepped up patrols in a capital that seemed only partially theirs.

U.S. warplanes took up round-the-clock patrols in the smoky skies over the city, driving home the point that the invading forces were there to stay.

Army and Marine tank regiments had entered Baghdad from the southwest and southeast early Saturday, driving through suburbs to within several miles of downtown and engaging in intense clashes with tenacious but outgunned Iraqi troops. The Americans then pulled back to redoubts just outside the city.

Spokesmen for the U.S. Central Command initially said American forces had reached the “heart” of Baghdad and intended to stay. But later they backed off, saying the troops had reached the suburbs, not the city center, and were not trying to occupy the capital. There were reports early today of large-scale U.S. troop movements on the outskirts of the city.

U.S. commanders said that the Iraqis had put up intense resistance but that their efforts did not appear coordinated and were no match for American firepower. They estimated that 1,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed in the battles that raged on city streets as the U.S. armor moved through. Although it was unclear how they arrived at that figure, Red Cross workers in Baghdad reported hundreds of dead and wounded, including many civilians.

One U.S. soldier, a tank commander, was reported killed in the battle, which left the 40 or so armored vehicles involved in the Army’s raid peppered with holes from grenades and small-arms fire.

U.S. officials said the pullback was part of a larger battle plan that relies on sharp, targeted incursions to send a message that the Iraqi regime is losing its grip on power. The Pentagon has said it hopes to avoid a drawn-out urban war that could devastate Baghdad and result in many civilian casualties.

“It was, I think, a clear statement of the ability of the coalition forces to move into Baghdad at times and places of their choosing, and to establish their presence, really, wherever they need to, in the city,” said Air Force Maj. Gen. Victor Renuart, head of operations for the Central Command in Doha, Qatar. “And those kinds of operations, I believe, will continue.”

Iraqi officials proclaimed victory and said their forces had repelled the invaders.

“Today, the tide has turned,” said Information Minister Mohammed Said Sahaf, who has yet to acknowledge an Iraqi setback in the war. “We are destroying them.”

In fact, the opposite appeared true, but some Americans seemed to have new respect for the Iraqi resisters.

“I was a tank commander in the Persian Gulf War,” said Army Lt. Col. Eric Schwartz, 41, who led an armored task force Saturday. “After today, I feel like I fought five Desert Storms.”

One American tank caught fire and had to be destroyed to keep it from falling into Iraqi hands. Several civilian cars tried to ram the tanks. A man with explosives strapped to his chest drove toward the column before being stopped by hundreds of rounds of tank fire, returning troops said. Clutches of Iraqis gathered along the streets of the city’s working-class neighborhoods. Some waved tentatively, but others gaped at the sight of Americans driving tanks along their streets.

There was no jubilation, few smiles and certainly no tossing of flowers as the armored vehicles moved through the city.

Although fighting continued elsewhere in Iraq on Saturday -- notably in the central city of Karbala and in Kurdish-dominated regions in the north -- the focus of the U.S.-led invasion was fixed steadily on Baghdad, the center of power for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Much of the country remains under at least the nominal control of Hussein’s Baath Party, but U.S. planners believe that Iraqis will readily accept a new regime if the leadership in Baghdad is rendered powerless.

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Allied Reach

Tens of thousands of U.S. and British troops are now positioned, from Iraq’s southern border with Kuwait, a full 350 miles to Baghdad. They ring the southern reaches of the capital and have cut off roads to the north, and are splayed westward toward Iraq’s border with Jordan. In addition, U.S. Special Forces are operating in northern Iraq with Kurdish guerrillas.

Elements of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division control Baghdad’s main airport and are transforming it into a forward operating base, Renuart said.

After Saturday’s bloody battle, U.S. forces reported that they held the two main highways leading north into the capital and east into the city center, and also laid claim to the southwest corner of Baghdad. Subsequent armored columns can use the highways to strike deeper into other parts of the city.

Black-clad militiamen and Republican Guard soldiers with tanks and artillery were for the first time taking up positions throughout the city.

They set up checkpoints on streets leading into the suburbs as an exodus of civilians continued.

On Saturday night, Iraqi television again showed footage of Hussein, sitting at a table with sons Uday and Qusai. As with previous tapes, it was impossible to tell when it had been made. As it aired, explosions again rocked Baghdad. Clouds of black smoke darkened the skies from trenches of oil set alight by the Iraqis as a defense.

While the Army held Baghdad’s airport, elements of the 1st Marine Division were flanking the capital from the southeast. This morning, Marines used backhoes to bury dozens of Iraqi bodies in mass graves. All were males; many appeared to have been armed and were killed in heavy fighting between Marines and Iraqi irregular forces. The documents of the men who were buried were taken by the Marines for later accounting.

On Saturday, Marine convoys passed burned-out Iraqi tanks, armored personnel carriers and antiaircraft batteries that stood beside verdant fields being tended by farmers on donkey carts.

Some of the weaponry was of Chinese and Russian origin, but some was from the days when the U.S. provided weapons for Iraq’s 1980-88 war with Iran. The convoy stopped near a charred personnel carrier, hit by a TOW missile. A burned, mangled body was still inside. The carrier was of U.S. manufacture.

“From the days when we liked Iraqis,” one gunnery sergeant said. “Now we kill them.”

U.S. ordnance specialists were busy blowing up caches of armaments found hidden in fields and behind barns. Most of the artillery and other wheeled weaponry were placed almost haphazardly along the road, leading Marines to believe that the Iraqi army has little sense of cover or positioning.

A stream of male Iraqis was seen fleeing, most on foot but others crammed inside aging cars and vans. Marines believed that many were Iraqi soldiers who had cast off their uniforms and boots to avoid being detected; uniforms and boots littered the road and fields.

Among prisoners captured by the Marines were Jordanians, Palestinians and Syrians who had come to fight in solidarity with the Iraqis.

Earlier in the day, as the front of the Marine column passed through a village, residents waved, smiled and even threw kisses to the Americans. But as the end of convoy passed by, someone delivered a parting bouquet: The column came under sniper fire.

The Marines stopped, ordered several hundred villagers to the ground and searched each one. They found no weapons and moved on.

Shortly after the incident, 1st Marine Division commander Maj. Gen. James Mattis issued nonfraternization orders: no throwing of candy to kids, no buying of Pepsi or cigarettes from them.

Also Saturday, the Central Command announced that its warplanes had hit the home of Gen. Ali Hassan Majid, a cousin of Hussein known as “Chemical Ali” for ordering poison gas attacks that killed thousands of Kurds in 1988. It was not known if the airstrike killed or injured the general, whose villa in the southern city of Basra was targeted early Saturday, but Pentagon officials said preliminary intelligence suggested that the strike had been a success. He has been the subject of an intense manhunt since the war began more than two weeks ago.

Renuart said the Army previously had been told that Majid was at the hospital in Nasiriyah where U.S. special operations forces rescued Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch on Tuesday night. He had apparently left by the time the American troops swooped in.

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Nonstop Bombing

Air Force Lt. Gen. T. Michael Moseley, who is in charge of the air war, said Saturday that American and British aircraft had launched nonstop bombing runs over Baghdad to provide support for U.S. ground forces in and around the capital. They will target, among other things, Republican Guard and paramilitary units, he said.

“I’ll tell you up front that our sensors show that the preponderance of the Republican Guard divisions that were outside of Baghdad are now dead,” he told reporters in a videophone interview from his base in Saudi Arabia. “We’re not softening them up. We’re killing them.”

Separately, two Marine pilots were killed in the crash of an AH-1W Super Cobra attack helicopter in central Iraq near the city of Al Kut shortly after midnight Saturday. Officials at the Central Command in Qatar said the crash appeared to be an accident, not the result of hostile fire. The names of the two-member crew were not released pending notification of relatives.

In northern Iraq, U.S. warplanes hit Iraqi positions near Mosul to enable Kurdish forces to capture a key bridge, while other Kurds moved toward the oil-rich city of Khanaqin.

In southern Iraq, British soldiers who have worked carefully to take control of Basra, the country’s second-largest city, said they adopted a more deliberate approach than the Americans did in Baghdad because the situations in the two cities were quite different.

“They’ve had a different enemy, a different makeup, more Republican Guards,” said Lt. Dan O’Connell, platoon commander with the Irish Guard.

The British army is gradually extending its presence in the city, O’Connell said, and is now making regular sorties a mile or two into Basra. There are indications that Iraqi fighters are running low on ammunition, he added.

It was the incursion by U.S. forces into Baghdad earlier Saturday that catapulted the war into a possibly decisive phase.

In the raid, which was filmed by an embedded crew from Fox Television, U.S. Army tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles raced along a divided highway in what appeared to be leafy suburbs, passing burning Iraqi tanks, trucks and artillery pieces -- a “gantlet” of resistance, according to unit commander Col. David Perkins.

Pickup trucks and cars were shot up and destroyed as they appeared either to try to ram the convoy or parallel it. Although Iraqi resistance was stiff at times, it was largely futile. It was also very bloody.

“There was a lot more incoming fire than I had expected. It was heavier resistance than I expected,” said Ron Martz, a reporter with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution who rode in the convoy. “It was not at all glamorous or glorious. There were a lot of dead and wounded people along the road, mostly soldiers, but there were some civilians too.”

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Iraqis Outgunned

Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard infantry fought the invasion using rocket-propelled grenades, pickup-mounted artillery and 57-millimeter antiaircraft cannons. But they were outgunned and outnumbered.

“The psychological impact of tanks rolling in the streets is not lost on the military or on Baghdad,” a senior U.S. military official said in Doha. “It is important psychologically that citizens know that the regime will be taken out and that they will be liberated.”

In his weekly radio address, President Bush said the allied forces were bringing aid and hope to Iraq. “Village by village, city by city, liberation is coming,” he said. “The people of Iraq have my pledge: Our fighting forces will press on until their oppressors are gone and their whole country is free.”

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Daniszewski reported from Baghdad, Zucchino with the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division and Perry with the 1st Marine Division. Times staff writers Paul Watson in northern Iraq; Tyler Marshall and Tracy Wilkinson in Doha; and John Hendren in Washington contributed to this report.