Airstrike Targets Hussein, Sons

Acting on an intelligence tip, a U.S. warplane dropped four powerful bunker-busting bombs on a meeting in a residential neighborhood Monday and the airstrike might have killed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, a U.S. official said.

“If he was in that facility, he would most likely be dead,” the official said.

He said American commanders do “not know for certain” that Hussein or his two sons, Uday and Qusai, were inside the building where the bombs hit but that the CIA was confident about information indicating that they had been meeting there earlier with members of the Iraqi intelligence service.

“This was the first [tip] that was fairly specific” about Hussein and his sons since the opening attack of the war, the official said in Washington. In a similar airstrike three weeks ago, U.S. forces launched cruise missiles and dropped bunker-busting bombs on another residential compound in Baghdad where the three were said to have been holed up.

In Monday’s attack, the four bombs left a huge crater, the official said on condition of anonymity. He described the target building as a structure in a residential part of the sprawling city. “It was not a government facility,” he said, adding that it was “just out in the community somewhere.”

The attack gave U.S. military officials ever-growing reason to be optimistic about the progress of the war, intended to remove Hussein from power and disarm his nation. U.S. forces were already occupying portions of the heart of Baghdad, parking their tanks outside Hussein’s opulent New Presidential Palace and isolating the Iraqi capital by controlling its airport and blocking most roads into the city.

The success did not come without American casualties.

During skirmishing Monday afternoon, an Iraqi missile struck a field headquarters of the 2nd Brigade of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, the main force in the center of Baghdad. Two soldiers and two journalists, one from Spain and the other from Germany, were killed and 15 other soldiers wounded.

In addition, the Marines said two of their troops had been killed when the 1st Division launched an amphibious assault across the Tigris River as it entered the city.

There also were reports of two possible discoveries of chemical weapons, one near the Baghdad airport and the other at an Iraqi military base east of the city of Karbala in central Iraq, but neither was confirmed by senior U.S. military officials.

They said the chemical material had to be tested more extensively to determine whether it was poison for weaponry.

“We’ll eventually know,” U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said.

Monday afternoon’s airstrike to kill Hussein and his sons, both of them significant officials in his regime, targeted the Mansour neighborhood in central Baghdad. The bunker-buster bombs were delivered by a B-1 aircraft, said a defense official at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Doha, Qatar.

Iraqi information officials escorted journalists to the Mansour neighborhood, where they saw a massive crater where four homes had once stood. Other homes in the area were single-family dwellings.

Firefighters sifted through the rubble, trying to find the remains of 10 people they said had been killed.

It was not clear whether U.S. forces could reach the target area immediately to search it. One U.S. official in Washington said he believes the United States has samples of DNA from relatives of Hussein that could be used to identify any remains of the Iraqi president.

There was no reason to believe there actually was a bunker at the targeted site, another official said. Hussein has been known to vary his routine constantly to avoid assassination, reportedly dropping in unannounced sometimes on the homes of ordinary Iraqis.

The official said the CIA had confidence in its intelligence that triggered the attack. “We get a lot of Elvis sightings,” the official said. “This is the first I recall [since March 20] that was fairly specific and gave a location. This thing was, ‘He is here right now.’ ”

Other U.S. officials said the CIA intelligence appeared to be information from a person in the city. The tip was so specific that it was described as the first reliable information that Hussein and his sons had survived the first strike against them at the beginning of the war.

Another U.S. official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said the American military stranglehold on Baghdad and the occupation of parts of the city by Marines and Army troops have dramatically increased the pressure on Hussein, his sons and their inner circle.

“There’s so much chaos there, the inner circle has gotten so much smaller,” the official said. “The odds continue to increase of getting a bead on him.”

The CIA and the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency have Iraqi informants working inside Baghdad, communicating with their U.S. handlers through high-tech communications gear, intelligence officials have said. It was possible, officials believed, that one or more of these sources saw Hussein’s entourage.

U.S. forces and intelligence operatives “have been in touch with a lot of different people” in the Iraqi military and top echelons of government, the official said. “When you’re in an endgame like this and people are trying to ensure their survival, somebody with knowledge could say, ‘I’ll take this information to the Americans.’ ”

U.S. intelligence closely monitored Iraqi electronic communications after the strike to see if there was a reaction among others in the regime indicating whether the attack had succeeded.

But officials said there was no such “chatter.”

Penetration to the heart of Hussein’s diminishing power brought a pause at the Pentagon for stocktaking. More than 125,000 allied troops were inside Iraq. During a Rumsfeld news conference, the names of 85 U.S. service members listed as killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom, out of the latest total of 96 fatalities, scrolled on a screen behind him.

More than 150 other American military personnel have been wounded.

Iraq has said at least 1,261 civilians have been killed and 5,103 injured.

Iraqi forces have suffered uncounted casualties. More than 7,000 Iraqi troops have been taken prisoner.

The Pentagon said all but about two dozen of Iraq’s more than 800 tanks have been destroyed, and Rumsfeld said Iraqi leaders were growing increasingly isolated. “The circle is closing,” he said, “and their options are running out.”

Nonetheless, Rumsfeld was reluctant to declare victory. Such an announcement, he said, was likely to come “later rather than sooner.”

Moreover, he said, victory would not necessarily depend on whether Hussein was captured or killed. “At that point where he is not running his country, he’s -- the regime has been changed.”

In downtown Baghdad, Col. David Perkins, commander of the 2nd Brigade, stood outside one of the two presidential palaces seized by U.S. forces and said: “We hold the city and all major instruments of power. The regime is no longer in power.

“Wherever Saddam Hussein is right now doesn’t matter. He’s irrelevant.”

Despite the American enthusiasm, Iraqis still controlled a majority of the city, and Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cautioned that U.S. forces had yet to confront Special Republican Guard units, the most loyal to Hussein and responsible for protecting him and other Iraqi leaders.

At Central Command, Navy Capt. Frank Thorp told reporters: “We should temper down our enthusiasm. This isn’t over.... There may be some tough days to follow.”

Indeed, the driving force behind Monday’s invasion of Baghdad was as much psychological as strategic. The raid attacked the symbols of Hussein’s power and was meant to discredit his regime.

Military officials made a point of releasing video footage of their exploration of the New Presidential Palace, a plush edifice in a country where many citizens go hungry. The tape showed golden bathroom fixtures, vaulted ceilings, a large dining room and rococo bedroom furnishings.

Capturing the presidential palaces reinforced the reality “that we [can] and will continue to conduct operations at a time and place of our choosing,” said Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, deputy director of operations for the Central Command. “The regime does not have the means of preventing that.”

On the southwestern edge of Baghdad, just east of the Diyala River, Marines discovered what appeared to be a large-scale training camp for the Palestine Liberation Front as well as documents indicating that Iraq had sold weapons to the PLF as recently as January for the front’s fight against Israel.

The Palestine Liberation Front was responsible for the 1985 hijacking off the coast of Egypt of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro, in which a disabled American, Leon Klinghoffer, was shot and pushed overboard.

Marines from the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Regiment, who found the facility said it had lecture halls, barracks, dining halls, an obstacle course, parade deck, administrative offices and bomb-making materials.

“This proves the link between Iraq and terror groups,” said Capt. Aaron Robertson, the battalion intelligence officer.

He said officers would investigate whether the camp was used to train Iraqis and others who have fought as part of the paramilitary groups that have ambushed and harassed allied forces.

The sense of persisting peril was reinforced by soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division, who discovered drums of buried chemicals at an Iraqi military base east of Karbala, a Shiite Muslim holy city about 50 miles south of Baghdad.

Their discovery triggered immediate tests for possible chemical weapons. Reuters news agency quoted an officer from the division as saying that initial tests had revealed the presence of two nerve agents, sarin and Tabun, in addition to a blister agent, lewisite.

Concern was heightened after several of the soldiers who found the chemicals, contained in three 55-gallon and eleven 25-gallon drums, fell ill and broke out in a rash.

However, Brig. Gen. Benjamin Freakly, one of the division’s senior officers, said analyses indicated the chemicals might be pesticides. He said the soldiers’ symptoms appeared to be related more to heat exhaustion than exposure to the chemicals.

He described the rash as a form of prickly heat.

Whatever the chemicals turn out to be, Freakly said, they had not been made a part of any weapons.

In a separate incident, a reporter from National Public Radio, traveling with the 101st Airborne Division, said about 20 BM-21 missiles fitted with chemical warheads were discovered near the Baghdad airport.

There was no independent confirmation of the report.

Documents from the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies listing the military arsenals of nations make no mention of BM-21 missiles in Iraqi possession.

In southern Iraq, residents of Basra, the nation’s second-largest city, began to embrace allied troops. Crowds mobbed British tanks.

Iraqi paramilitary fighters fled into the community or out of town.

British paratroopers entering the city on foot met little resistance apart from an occasional burst of machine-gun fire. They advanced toward the center of the city amid evidence of extensive looting.

Some residents decried the British and Americans for destroying the old order without creating a replacement.

British troops guarded a few strategic sites, including hospitals and nearby oil refineries, but said their first priority was to rid Basra of fighters and their weapons.

Rumsfeld acknowledged the presence of exiled Iraqis in southern Iraq and said some Iraqis -- both residents and exiles -- were playing a military role alongside allied forces in the south, west and north.

But he indicated that the presence of Ahmad Chalabi, head of the exiled Iraqi National Congress opposition group, did not signify any broader role for him in a new Iraqi government.

“The Iraqi people are going to sort out what their Iraqi government ought to look like,” Rumsfeld said.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told reporters aboard Air Force One as it took President Bush to Northern Ireland and his third wartime summit with British Prime Minister Tony Blair that a move to create an Iraqi interim authority may come before Hussein is ousted.

As allied warplanes intensified their bombardment of Baghdad early today, the offices of the pan-Arab television news network Al Jazeera were hit, staff members said. One correspondent, Tarik Ayoub, was killed and several others were injured.

Iraqi state television ceased live broadcasts, failing to show its normal morning news bulletins and featuring patriotic songs instead, along with old footage of Hussein being cheered at rallies.

During Monday’s fighting in the city, U.S. tanks destroyed six Iraqi vehicles that charged across a bridge toward Hussein’s Old Palace in his presidential complex.

The tanks opened fire with 20-millimeter guns and .50-caliber machine guns.

One of the vehicles, a white sedan, stopped partway across the bridge. Its occupants were killed as they tried to flee.

The car exploded.

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Miller reported from Washington, Daniszewski from Baghdad and Zucchino with the 3rd Infantry Division. Times staff writers Geoffrey Mohan with the 3rd Infantry Division; Tyler Marshall, Tracy Wilkinson, Mark Porubcansky and Jailan Zayan in Doha; Tony Perry with the 1st Marine Division; Mark Magnier in Basra; and John Hendren in Washington contributed to this report.

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Casualties

Military totals (as of 11 p.m. Pacific time Monday)

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U.S Britain Iraq Killed 96 30 unknown

Missing 8 0 unknown

Captured 7 0 7,000

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Civilian casualties

Iraq says at least 1,261 civilians have been killed. Eight journalists -- 2 Britons, an American, an Australian, an Iranian, a Spaniard, a German and an employee of the Al Jazeera TV network -- also have been killed.