U.S. Planes Pummel Iraqis Along Border : Gulf War: Intent of enemy movements remains a puzzle. Allies report seizing 400 POWs in Khafji fighting.

U.S. warplanes Friday pummeled Iraqi troops and armored vehicles moving along the Kuwaiti border with Saudi Arabia, but the aim of the Iraqi movement remained unclear.

U.S. and Saudi officials said allied forces seized at least 400 Iraqi prisoners of war in two days of clashes in and near the Saudi town of Khafji that ended Thursday night.

Also Friday, officials confirmed that an AC-130 Spectre gunship had been shot down in southern Iraq early Thursday. Search and rescue operations for the crew were called off Friday night, and the 14 crew members were listed as missing in action.

U.S. losses now total 11 killed, 9 wounded, 8 held prisoner and 23 missing, including the AC-130 crew. Thirteen American aircraft have been lost in the first 16 days of combat.

In other developments:

A Michigan couple said the Pentagon has informed them that their daughter, an Army specialist, is missing in the war zone.

France granted permission to U.S. B-52 bombers based in Britain to fly over its territory on bombing missions to the Persian Gulf. Neutral Switzerland said it will let U.S. medical evacuation aircraft cross its airspace for one week starting today “for humanitarian purposes.” And Spanish defense officials acknowledged that Spain is allowing B-52s to use a joint Spanish-U.S. air base as a staging area for raids on Iraq.

Military authorities in Saudi Arabia are investigating the deaths of 11 Marines in the fighting around Khafji to determine whether any were killed by allied “friendly” fire.

Ground-hugging Tomahawk missiles fired from U.S. Navy warships struck Baghdad, Iraqi officials told Western journalists in the Iraqi capital. Two crashed in residential neighborhoods and narrowly missed the abandoned American Embassy, they said.

President Bush, speaking to the cheering families of soldiers poised for combat in Saudi Arabia, told them that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has an “endless appetite for evil” but that the U.S.-led military coalition will teach him a lesson.

Pool reports coming in from the front said that an Iraqi tank attack took place late Thursday night about 50 miles west of Khafji near the Kuwaiti border town of Umm Hujul. According to the reports, three Iraqi tanks were destroyed by elements of the 1st Marine Division in an area of open desert. No U.S. casualties were reported in the fighting.

Marine pilots also reported seeing numerous secondary explosions during their air strikes. The fighting began when the Marines spotted the tanks crossing the Kuwait border into Saudi Arabia. On Friday, heavy fighting was reported just to the north of Khafji.

Allied officials gave varying figures for Iraqi casualties and captured prisoners in the 36-hour battle that started Tuesday night. At first, the British said 300 Iraqis had died. Then they said this was a mistake and changed the figure to 30. U.S. officials have refused to disclose any official estimates of Iraqi forces killed in action.

Saudi Lt. Gen. Prince Khalid ibn Sultan said that the Iraqis “lost 90% of their forces” involved in the two days of battle.

However, another Saudi officer, Col. Ahmed Robayan, chief spokesman for the Arab Joint Forces Command, gave a significantly lower figure for Iraqi losses at Khafji. He said 30 Iraqis were killed, 33 wounded and 400 captured, but he called those figures “preliminary.”

A U.S. official said that 500 Iraqis were captured and that all would be placed under Saudi administration.

Robayan said the Iraqi force in the Khafji battle was “brigade-minus” in size, meaning fewer than 4,000 troops. Earlier estimates put the size of the attacking force at 1,500.

He gave Saudi casualties as 15 killed, 32 wounded and 4 missing.

Robayan also said the Saudi and Qatari troops who retook Khafji on Thursday had seized “enough equipment to equip an entire armored battalion and an infantry battalion.”

Battle debris was strewn about the road into Khafji, and soldiers warned one another to walk carefully because of mines and booby-traps. While it was unclear whether the Iraqis were preparing for another attack, one U.S. military officer said the Iraqis were certainly capable of crossing the border again. Iraqi troops were reported moving north of the border.

Lt. Gen. Walter Boomer, commander of U.S. Marines in the Gulf, told pool correspondents that the Iraqis’ failed attack on Khafji was not significant militarily and would have “zero effect” on any allied plans for a ground war.

Asked if the Iraqis hadn’t been bold in attacking the abandoned town and holding it for 24 hours, he replied: “I don’t know how much courage it took to stay in Khafji when there wasn’t anybody there. It sure didn’t take very long to have ‘em exit.”

Boomer, who spoke to pool reporters at a northern base, said the launching of a possible ground attack would be at a time of the allies’ choosing, not that of Hussein. He cautioned patience in moving from an air war into a ground war.

“In my view, the air campaign is working,” he said.

The Iraqi armor was clearly no match for the allies’ missiles. Along the streets and roads, Soviet-built amphibious armored personnel carriers, their hulls smashed and gutted by TOW missiles, burned for hours, their dead Iraqi crews still inside.

Despite the losses, Iraq has hailed the attack at Khafji as a great victory.

“They fled in front of us like women and like shepherds roving aimlessly in the desert,” said one Iraqi soldier in an interview on a Baghdad radio station.

Iraq’s Strategy

American commanders said they are pleased that Iraqi forces were moving out from their border fortifications and said they were being systematically destroyed by allied air strikes.

Allied aircraft flew more than 2,500 sorties Friday, including waves of B-52 bombings against Iraqi troops that U.S. military officials described as “fantastically effective.” U.S. officials said not a single Iraqi aircraft took to the air in defense.

The director of U.S. air forces in Saudi Arabia said the Iraqi ground probes were “stupid.” Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles A. Horner said: “Now why is he doing that? To me, it occurs one of the answers is that he’s desperate, and he sees that he’s getting chewed up.”

One senior Pentagon officer called the Iraqi troop movements a “suicide mission” with a political, rather than a military goal.

Iraqi President Hussein apparently is trying to launch a major ground offensive at Wafra, on the Kuwaiti-Iraqi border, this officer said, “but he had to know his troops were going to get pounded once he brings his vehicles and personnel out of dug-in positions to mass them for an attack. It’s almost criminal what I’m seeing going on here. They are (simply) targets.”

This analyst continued: “Militarily, he has to know that he’s being annihilated. But he’s going for a political victory. He’ll say he has faced the whole world but he managed to take the initiative on all fronts and survived to say it.”

He said the flight of the cream of the Iraqi air force to Iran and the similar attempt by Iraqi naval vessels to seek refuge in Iranian ports were part of a strategy of conserving key military resources to serve as the nucleus of a postwar military.

But other senior commanders expressed puzzlement at the Iraqi troop movements--which were apparently on a considerably smaller scale than indicated in initial reports from the field, which said that as many as four divisions or 60,000 men were massing for an attack. Early reports of a 10-mile column of Iraqi armor moving toward Saudi Arabia were also discounted by American generals.

Lt. Gen. Thomas W. Kelly, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that allied forces had detected a “reasonable amount of movement” of Iraqi troops in southern Kuwait, but that it was not concentrated at one point or in one salient.

“They’re moving in all directions--north, south, east and west,” Kelly said at a Pentagon briefing. “We didn’t see any real pattern. It didn’t look like an arrowhead coming down the road toward Saudi Arabia.”

The general added, “We can’t read the Iraqi high command or Saddam Hussein’s mind.”

One Pentagon official welcomed the Iraqi actions, no matter how inexplicable.

“Our pilots are having a heyday,” he said. “They’re rolling in on top of them, day and night, and knocking out everything. They’re suffering significant losses of tanks, APCs (armored personnel carriers), artillery. He’s making our job easier for us. This is what we wanted him to do.”

Despite reports from Iraqi prisoners that Hussein’s troops were unhealthy, ill-fed and subjected to harsh discipline, U.S. officials said that the Iraqi army remains an “effective fighting force.”

But Rear Adm. John (Mike) McConnell, director of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs, said the enemy troops were under “continuous attack, wave after wave. . . . If they are foolish enough to come out of those positions, they’ll be a less effective fighting force.”

U.S., British and Saudi forces have destroyed 33 Iraqi tanks and 28 armored personnel carriers in the Wafra area west of the recaptured Saudi town of Khafji, a U.S. officer in Saudi Arabia said.

Prime Minister John Major told British Armed Forces Radio that Hussein knew he was losing the war.

“It was a desperate ploy in some ways for Iraqis to come out of Kuwait in the way they’ve done,” Major said. “The more he comes out, the more I think he’ll run into the sort of difficulties he did at Khafji.”

The Missing Woman

In Michigan, the parents of Spec. Melissa Ann Rathbun-Nealy, 20, said the Army has told them that she is the American woman soldier earlier referred to as missing in action near the Saudi-Kuwaiti border.

Joan and Leo Rathbun of Newaygo, near Grand Rapids, said they learned the bad news Thursday night when an Army captain paid them a visit. Before, they said, the idea that their daughter might be the missing woman had seemed so unlikely they joked about it.

But their visitor was deadly serious.

“It’s been a nightmare,” Joan Rathbun, a retired school teacher, told Detroit television station WXYZ-TV. “It’s like I’m having a dream and it hasn’t happened. . . . My greatest concern is, if she is a prisoner, she’ll be treated right. . . . We are going to have to stop this (war) somehow.

“We’re losing sons and daughters.”

An Army jeep carrying Spec. Rathbun-Nealy and an unidentified male soldier was found earlier this week on a desert highway near the Saudi-Kuwaiti border. It contained gas masks and protective suits. But there was no sign of either of its occupants.

Baghdad Tomahawks

Several people were killed or wounded when at least six U.S. Navy cruise missiles struck Baghdad at midday Friday, Iraqi officials said.

One missile reportedly leveled the home of a merchant in the Karada Sharqiya district of the city, causing a number of casualties. The other was said to have destroyed several houses about 1,500 yards from the U.S. Embassy, in Baghdad’s Masbah district.

Four other blasts, apparently also from Tomahawk cruise missiles, were heard in other parts of the city, but Western reporters said it was unclear where they had landed.

A woman who said her two brothers were injured in the explosion in the Masbah district shouted at Western reporters who tried to interview her, the Associated Press said in a report cleared by Iraqi censors.

“Is this Western justice?” Suha Turehi asked, pointing to the debris of her single-story home. “Is this Western civilization? You are treating us like red Indians. Go away! Go away!”

Times staff writer Robin Wright in Washington contributed to this report, which was compiled in part from pool dispatches.

WAR ACTION

A--Allied forces were engaged in fighting with Iraqi troops north and west of the deserted town of Khafji.

B--The Pentagon confirmed that an AC130-H gunship had crashed in southern Iraq early Thursday; all 14 aboard were listed as missing in action.

C--Experts said the mammoth oil slick in the gulf was breaking up, foiling efforts to contain it. U.S. officials say Iraq deliberately caused the slick, the world’s largest, which is now about 17 miles north of the largest Saudi desalination plant.

D--U.S. warplanes pummeled Iraqi troops and armored vehicles moving along the Kuwaiti-Saudi border. Early reports of an Iraqi column stretching 10 miles--up to 1,000 vehicles--were discounted by U.S. generals, who said there was movement in several directions in southern Kuwait.