U.S. Steps Up Combat, Launches 7 Firefights : Gulf War: Two soldiers killed, six wounded by ‘friendly fire’ from a U.S. helicopter in night attack. British admit that a ‘smart’ bomb veered off course and into Iraqi town.

U.S. forces launched seven firefights against Iraqi troops Sunday in a stepped-up pace of ground combat that saw two American soldiers killed and six wounded when their armored vehicles were hit by missiles from one of their own helicopters during night fighting.

The two soldiers were killed in one of the separate engagements along the border punctuated by heavy ground and helicopter fire against Iraqi patrols and positions.

Their deaths were the first American fatalities suffered by an Army unit while engaged in combat with the Iraqis, and the first involving helicopters flying in close support of U.S. ground troops, according to a spokesman for the 1st Infantry Division.

An AH-64 Apache helicopter launched Hellfire missiles on an M-2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle and on an armored personnel carrier carrying a ground surveillance radar, officials said.

Both vehicles were destroyed, killing the two crew members of the Bradley vehicle. Although the six soldiers in the armored personnel carrier were injured, none of them were in serious condition, military officials said.

In the pre-dawn border raids Sunday, three Iraqi tanks, a multiple rocket launcher and two bunkers were destroyed, allied officials said. According to Marine Brig. Gen. Richard I. Neal, the Iraqi targets were patrols that were “apparently trying to determine the disposition of U.S. positions all along the border.”

Neal said at a press briefing that the allies flew 2,600 sorties Sunday, bringing the total to 78,000 since the beginning of the air war. He said 800 of those were flown in the Kuwait theater of operations. Neal also said a Huey helicopter crashed in a noncombat accident, with slight injuries to the crew.

Over the last two weeks, allied warplanes have gradually shifted the focus of their attention to the southern Kuwait front in what has been described by the military as “shaping the battlefield.”

“It’s a transition to a ground offensive,” said one knowledgeable military source.

In other developments:

* Iraqi Foreign Minister Tarik Aziz arrived in Moscow for talks today with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, but President Bush and other Administration officials saw little hope Sunday for a negotiated settlement to the war.

* British military officials admitted that a “smart” bomb dropped from one of its warplanes veered off course and into the Iraqi town of Fallouja last week. Officials, however, said they had no evidence to support Iraq’s report that civilians were killed there.

* In addition to hundreds of civilians that they say have been killed in Baghdad, Iraqi officials said a total of 585 more have died in allied raids on three other cities during the Gulf War’s first month.

* Iraq unveiled yet another variation on the Scud ballistic missile in a Saturday attack on Israel, Baghdad Radio reported, adding that Israel’s nuclear reactor was the target.

* Allied air raids have laid waste to Baghdad’s water and sewage systems, leaving the Iraqi capital vulnerable to outbreaks of typhus and cholera, the city’s mayor said Sunday.

Ground Fighting

Allied firepower directed at Iraqi forces over the last several days has markedly raised the tempo of ground action, which until recently consisted of little more than lobbing artillery shells at Iraqi positions across the border in occupied Kuwait.

The quickening pace comes on the heels of disclosures by senior Pentagon officials Saturday that the United States is planning to unleash a ground, air and sea assault of unprecedented ferocity unless there is an Iraqi surrender or a diplomatic deal within the next three days.

The fact that the Americans seemed to be escalating their activity along the border follows a planned strategy of gradually increasing the tempo of the attacks against the Iraqis until the ground war begins.

A military source said the Americans initiated all seven clashes with the Iraqi troops Sunday after U.S. forces spotted the Iraqis by using their superior night vision capabilities and by employing helicopters as observation posts.

“What is happening is a lot of activity,” the source said. “It is a result of them (the Iraqis) trying to get a handle on what is in front of them--looking for soft spots. On the other side, we’ve got U.S. forces doing likewise. We’re trying to see what his activity is. We have been very aggressive in trying to stop this reconnaissance of his.”

Helicopters and infantrymen from the 101st Airborne Division captured 41 Iraqi soldiers in separate attacks on Iraqi positions. In one of the incidents, Iraqi soldiers in a bunker fired small arms at an Apache attack helicopter, which replied with a rocket, striking the bunker.

It was not known how many Iraqis, if any, were killed by the rocket. But a number of Iraqis then quickly emerged from the bunker with their hands raised.

“The EPWs (enemy prisoners of war) immediately went into a surrender mode,” said Neal, describing one of the capture scenes. “They walked back with the Apaches covering them.”

The increased tempo of military activity has led to speculation that a land war is imminent, and French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas said Sunday that the allies have already set a date for the ground assault.

“We are on the eve or the pre-eve of the ground offensive for the liberation of Kuwait,” Dumas said in a radio interview in Paris, without saying exactly when the attack would occur.

When reporters at the U.S. military briefing in Riyadh asked about Dumas’ comment, however, Gen. Neal said it was false.

“No, there is no date set at this time,” he said.

Friendly Fire’

The two American soldiers killed by so-called “friendly fire” were on Iraqi soil as part of a 1st Infantry Division task force conducting reconnaissance operations when their unit suddenly encountered an Iraqi armored column.

In the intense firefight that ensued, the U.S. forces fired two Hellfire missiles as well as artillery while calling in Apache helicopters to attack the Iraqi tanks and armored vehicles.

The Apache crew that mistakenly fired the fatal Hellfire missiles at its own forces “is a well-disciplined and trained crew and has been flying together for 15 months,” according to a statement issued by the division. How the mistake happened was not immediately clear.

Gen. Neal said the incident occurred “at night with moving vehicles. It was a very dangerous environment.”

Two Iraqi tanks were destroyed during the battle, and the Iraqi forces did not inflict any casualties on the Americans, according to U.S. officials. Later in the day, the division continued its heavy artillery bombardment of Iraqi positions, firing more than 1,500 rounds from eight-inch and 155-millimeter howitzers and multiple-launch rocket systems.

The incident was the worst case of friendly fire since Jan. 29, when seven Marines were killed when a rocket fired by a U.S. warplane struck their reconnaissance vehicle on the Saudi-Kuwaiti border.

The investigation into the details of the latest friendly fire incident will continue for some time. But in an interview less than a month ago, Lt. Col. Ralph Hayles, commander of the Apache battalion involved in Sunday’s tragedy, said that while such incidents were always possible, the armed forces use a variety of methods to prevent such occurrences.

“We have two methods of fire control,” Hayles said. “If we fly beyond where friendly forces are, the vehicles are in enemy territory, a free-fire zone, and we see vehicles, we kill them. But in close contact fighting with tanks, we must have a positive identification to fire.”

One method of obtaining a positive identification, Hayles said, involves having one Apache helicopter fly forward to make an identification while a second helicopter remains farther back--ultimately firing if a target is identified as hostile.

“The Apache always knows where it is, and where the edge of the American forces are,” Hayles said in January while discussing the possibility of friendly fire casualties. “Those are precise measurements. I have a high confidence we won’t shoot coalition forces.”

Yet on a subsequent press visit to a cavalry unit that was trying to trap Iraqi troops with the help of Apache helicopters near the Iraqi border, some drivers of Bradley armored vehicles had expressed specific reservations about coming under friendly fire.

Several of the drivers asserted that the Apaches had trouble finding the Iraqis at night.

Foot soldiers “have very little faith in the Apache,” one GI said.

Wayward Bomb

A laser-guided bomb intended for a bridge near Fallouja, 40 miles west of Baghdad, went astray and veered off into the town, British military officials conceded.

Iraq said Sunday that the bomb killed 120 people and left 78 injured when it slammed into a residential block and a market on Thursday. On Saturday, the Iraqis had given a total of 130 dead in Fallouja.

While expressing regret if civilians were killed, the British military spokesman, Group Capt. Niall Irving, said, “We have no evidence of that whatsoever.”

Irving told reporters that a discrepancy existed over the day of the attack. No British planes attacked Fallouja on Thursday, he said, but Royal Air Force Tornado fighters hit a bridge outside the town on Wednesday.

One bomb hit the bridge, two fell harmlessly in the water and another veered off into the town. Irving showed a videotape in which a column of smoke could be seen rising from what he called a populated area in Fallouja.

He said military officials were investigating “the fine detail” of the bombing, because the allegations of civilian casualties “are very important to us.”

Civilian Toll

Iraqi officials said hospitals in three cities outside Baghdad are “packed with wounded civilians” and that 585 civilians had been killed in those cities in the war’s first month.

“Up to last Thursday, 300 people had been killed in Nasiriyah, 165 in Hillah and 120 in Fallouja,” Information Minister Latif Nassif Jassem said in a statement quoted by the state-run Iranian news agency.

The agency said that Iranian reporters had toured buildings and mosques damaged in Najaf, a city considered holy by Muslims, and that an additional 250 civilians were killed and 1,000 wounded.

Najaf and nearby Karbala in central Iraq are the centers of Shiite Muslim religious learning, and several saints’ tombs are in Najaf. The Iranian news agency did not report any damage to shrines in either place.

Shale Stone’ Missile

In describing the Saturday missile attack on Israel, Baghdad Radio said three of what Iraq calls its new Hijara al Sijjil, or shale stone, missiles were launched at Israel’s nuclear reactor, scoring “destructive strikes” on Dimona, a town in the Negev Desert where the reactor is located.

The new version of Iraq’s Scud missile takes its name from a story in the Koran relating how giant, divinely dispatched birds dropped shale stones on invaders who attacked the Kaaba, Islam’s holiest shrine.

The Baghdad Radio broadcast cited a military communique that also said another missile hit Israel’s northern port city of Haifa. Israeli officials acknowledged that one missile fell in the Negev, causing no damage. They would not say, however, whether Dimona was considered the target.

The Negev is in Israel’s south. Until recently, all the Scud hits on Israel have been in the northern and central regions.

In Baghdad

Bombing raids have so severely damaged Baghdad’s sewage system and disrupted water supplies that residents “very likely” face epidemics, Mayor Khalid Abdul-Munim told Britain’s Independent Television News.

“Four million people are living in a nightmare every day and night,” the mayor said. “So my feelings are in despair, and I’m sorry I can’t give them anything except my sympathy.”

Most of the capital’s water purification plants were either knocked out in bombing raids or have no electricity to operate, the mayor said.

Cholera and typhoid fever “might set in soon,” Abdul-Munim said, “if the people continue having no clean drinking water.”

The lack of clean drinking water also poses a “severe risk” of diarrhea, salmonella and hepatitis, Iraq’s health minister, Mohamed Sayed, told Britain’s Observer newspaper.

Meanwhile, travelers reaching Nicosia, Cyprus, on Sunday gave vivid accounts of a demonstration against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein by up to 5,000 people in southern Iraq earlier this month. The travelers told the Associated Press that the demonstrators shot and killed 10 officials of Iraq’s ruling Baath Arab Socialist Party who tried to stop the protest.

The demonstration in the southern city of Diwaniyeh was the first known protest against Hussein since the war began Jan. 17, the travelers said.

Times staff writers Mark Fineman in Amman, Jordan, and Ed Chen in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, contributed to this story.