Allies Pound Iraqi Guard Near Capital

In ground combat inching ever closer to the Iraqi capital, U.S. and British troops battled Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard along the banks of the Euphrates River on Monday as allied jets slammed the guard with one of the fiercest missile and bomb attacks of the war.

The Iraqis moved armored forces from a Republican Guard division north of Baghdad to the south, American commanders said. Some of the military officials took that as a sign that the air assaults had significantly weakened the guard’s prized Medina Division, arrayed between Baghdad and U.S. troops along the Euphrates.

Meanwhile, one soldier from the U.S. 101st Airborne Division was killed in a raging street fight on the outskirts of Najaf, in central Iraq, and U.S. troops -- on heightened alert because of a suicide car bombing two days earlier -- killed seven women and children in a car the troops said failed to stop, despite commands and warning shots, at a checkpoint near the city.

In a similar incident early today, U.S. Marines said they killed an Iraqi who drove his pickup truck rapidly toward a checkpoint outside the southern town of Shatra, the Reuters news agency said. A Reuters reporter with the Marines said the man’s passenger was wounded and that neither person was armed or in uniform and the truck bed was empty.

“I thought it was a suicide bomb,” the reporter quoted one of the Marines as saying after he fired on the pickup.

One aim of allied commanders before the battle for Baghdad is to neutralize the Medina Division, which is protecting the southern perimeter of the city. Some U.S. commanders said they thought the movement of armored troops from a northern Republican Guard division to join the Medina forces showed that the goal was being reached. It brought expressions of satisfaction.

“We are seeing significant degrading of those forces,” said Army Maj. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, vice director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. However, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command in Doha, Qatar, was more cautious. Moving the northern division south “may be replacing losses as a result of the actions we have inflicted,” said Army Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks. Or “it may be reinforcements.”

In Baghdad, bombs and missiles brought thunderous explosions overnight and early today, as warplanes repeatedly struck the Republican Palace complex, including a palace reportedly belonging to Hussein’s son Qusai. It was just across the Tigris River from the Palestine Hotel, where many international reporters stay.

At a news conference in the capital, Foreign Minister Naji Sabri showed defiance, vowing to slay the armies that had invaded his country.

“We will turn the desert into graves,” Sabri said.

A statement issued in Baghdad by Iraqi officials on Hussein’s behalf denied that any of his close family had fled the country and said his fate and that of his relatives were tied to the fate of the Iraqi people.

The statement appeared to be responding to speculation that the older of his two wives, Sajida, and his daughters had left Iraq.

While some Iraqis fled, thousands working in neighboring Jordan were returning home to fight. Iraqi officials in Baghdad said some 4,000 Arabs from throughout the Middle East have come to help repel the allied invaders. The claim could not be verified.

Fighting raged just 50 miles south of Baghdad, the closest the ground combat has come to the capital. The U.S. 3rd Infantry Division used tanks and artillery to battle Iraqi forces, including elements of the Republican Guard, in the village of Albu Aziz, on the banks of the Euphrates near the town of Hindiyah.

Soldiers fought street to street as American tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles raced for a strategic bridge across the river.

Nearly 50 Iraqi soldiers were killed and dozens surrendered, some from the Republican Guard. One of the prisoners was their battalion commander from the Nebuchadnezzar Division, which is normally based north of Baghdad.

Albu Aziz and Hindiyah are only miles from Karbala, a Shiite Muslim holy city of about 549,000 at Karbala Gap, a chokepoint between the Euphrates and Razzaza Lake on the doorstep of Baghdad.

Capture of the Republican Guard troops and their battalion commander strengthened evidence that at least one armored unit from the Nebuchadnezzar Division was moving to join the Medina forces on the southern flank of the capital.

“Things are so bad for the [Medina] units in the south that they decided to bring this very valuable unit south to stiffen the defense,” said a senior military official in Doha.

Warplanes were concentrating on the Republican Guard. One military source said U.S. and British aircraft flew 2,000 bombing runs Monday, 85% of them close air support aimed at hammering the guard and other Iraqi troops.

The most targeted unit, the Medina Division, was down to less than half its original troop strength, one Pentagon official said.

Communication intercepts have shown that repeated airstrikes have taken a heavy toll on the Republican Guard’s command and control capabilities, said the military official at Central Command.

“We see weaknesses in the way they are talking,” the official said. “They’re worried, and they ought to be.”

There was no set time for allied forces to begin their march on Baghdad, said British Royal Marine Capt. John Fynes. “It’ll be up to the Army to decide when those [Republican Guard] forces are degraded sufficiently.”

The death of the soldier from the 101st Airborne Division outside Najaf came as troops fought their way into the city of 563,000 to defeat paramilitary fighters skilled in guerrilla tactics.

The division did not say whether any Americans were wounded.

Commanders said about 100 Iraqis were killed or wounded and 50 more gave up or were taken prisoner.

The American casualty showed the dangers of fighting block to block in the cities of central and southern Iraq, Fynes said. He added that urban warfare can be as hard from the air. American and British pilots face the difficulty of providing close air support in and around civilian homes, he said, which means that commanders must weigh the need for support against the risk of harming civilians.

“If there is a building with 150 to 200 soldiers who are going to take a lot of ground fighting to get out, there is going to be a lot of damage to buildings around it -- the risk of tank shells going over and landing in populated areas,” Fynes said.

“On that occasion, we might say one precision bomb, with a risk to houses immediately round it, is less than the ground forces,” he said.

At the roadblock near Najaf, where U.S. Army soldiers killed and injured the carful of Iraqi women and children, a question arose over whether the soldiers had fired their warning shots early enough.

Military officials in Qatar said the driver of the car continued through the checkpoint on Route 9 after ignoring soldiers who motioned for the vehicle to stop, fired warning shots and then fired into the engine of the car.

The incident occurred as U.S. soldiers were on heightened alert for potential suicide bombers. Iraq’s vice president had warned that others would emulate an Iraqi soldier who drove his taxi to an allied checkpoint Saturday and detonated a bomb that killed himself and four U.S. Marines.

Defense officials said initial reports suggested that the soldiers exercised “considerable restraint to avoid the unnecessary loss of life” and followed their rules of engagement.

However, the Washington Post, which had a reporter at the scene, said that Capt. Ronny Johnson of the 3rd Infantry Division shouted at a platoon leader: “You just ... killed a family because you didn’t fire a warning shot soon enough!”

The incident was likely to make it more difficult to convince Iraqi civilians that Americans had invaded their country to help them.

A senior officer acknowledged that the military’s campaign to win over the Iraqis with millions of leaflets, radio broadcasts and direct contact with civilians has failed to sway large numbers to support the invasion.

Americans have not yet been able to dispel the deep-seated mistrust with which Iraqis regard them, the officer said on condition of anonymity.

He acknowledged that bombing a cherished city like Baghdad could backfire and turn the Iraqis even more sharply against Americans.

“Is it possible that it could stiffen the resolve of the people?” the officer said to a group of journalists. “When they have absolutely no understanding of what’s happening around them ... it may well be stiffening their resolve for fighting for the regime.”

Near the town of Al Kut on the southeastern flank of the allies’ three-pronged advance on Baghdad, American helicopters strafed the countryside to destroy Iraqi mortar positions hidden in onion fields.

At one spot, U.S. troops found a drainage ditch that had been abandoned so hurriedly by Iraqi soldiers that they left behind their boots, stuck in the mud.

At the town of Shatrah, 25 miles north of Nasiriyah, in southern Iraq, U.S. Marines reportedly searched unsuccessfully for Ali Hassan Majid, one of Hussein’s cousins, known as “Chemical Ali” because he pioneered the Hussein regime’s use of chemical warfare against civilians.

Near the captured airfield of Tallil, southwest of Nasiriyah, the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force seized about 40 buildings filled with weapons, including ammunition, chemical decontamination equipment and chemical protection suits, Central Command officials said.

They said the cache was as large as the ammunition supply at Camp Pendleton.

Still farther south, British forces said they had broken Iraqi resistance in the Basra suburb of Abdl Khasib and captured 50 soldiers after heavy fighting through much of Sunday night and early Monday.

On the outskirts of Basra, the Irish Guards launched a late-afternoon probe as six Challenger tanks rumbled at least half a mile into the city for the second time in three days.

“We push quite far in to see what the enemy’s up to, see their strengths, give them a good fright and check their disposition,” said Capt. Alex Cosby, commander at the last British checkpoint before Basra, just east of the Azubayr Bridge.

What these forays are showing, Cosby said, is that many of the Iraqis opposing allied forces are frightened and are not committed fighters. They show signs, he said, of being put up to their resistance by bribery or coercion.

“Their rocket-propelled grenades are getting farther away from us,” Cosby said.

“They’re probably being told to fire their RPG if they want to get any food,” he said. “They have guns at their backs.”

British forces in the Challengers shelled an abandoned factory alongside a road leading into Basra from Safwan, to the south.

The British reiterated their view that infantry and Marine troops must move into Basra in hand-to-hand combat. But they said it was important to get the timing right, given the mixed objectives: driving Hussein from power while winning over the Iraqi people.

“It’s a different war than we thought it would be,” said Sgt. Scott Brettle of the Irish Guards. “It makes our job a lot easier if we can get the people on our side.”

At the Azubayr Bridge checkpoint, soldiers were passing out blue-and-white leaflets to Iraqis going into and leaving Basra.

“We are here to cooperate with you and help bring life back to normal,” the leaflets said. “Support the new order in this transition period. Don’t carry weapons, and follow orders of coalition forces. Enjoy peace and respect the law.”

On the northern front, surrendering Iraqi soldiers said round-the-clock strikes were loosening the hold of Iraqi officers on their troops and giving demoralized draftees opportunities to flee.

The strikes, by B-52, B-1 and B-2 bombers struck Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, as well as a front line of the Iraqi army’s 1st, 2nd and 5th corps.

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Daniszewski reported from Baghdad and Mohan from the 3rd Infantry in Albu Aziz. Times staff writers John Hendren in Washington; Tracy Wilkinson and Tyler Marshall in Doha; David Zucchino with the 101st Airborne near Najaf; Mark Magnier near Basra; Paul Watson in Irbil, Iraq; David Wharton in Kuwait City; and Megan K. Stack in Amman, Jordan, contributed to this report.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Battlefield report

The Toll

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

U.S Britain Iraq Killed 44 26 Unknown

Missing 16 0 Unknown

Captured 7 0 3,500

*--*

Civilian casualties

* Iraq has said at least 500 civilians have been killed.