Speeding Cars Carry Threat of Bombing

The car just kept coming. A white 1980s-era Caprice Classic barreled down a war-torn boulevard here, leading straight toward one of Saddam Hussein’s elaborate palace compounds -- and the U.S. troops who had just seized it.

Tanks of the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division fired machine guns in front of it. The car accelerated. They fired into the engine block and the windshield. Still it came -- until one of the tanks fired a high-explosive anti-tank (HEAT) round from its 120-millimeter main gun straight through the old Chevrolet. The car came to a halt against a light post, pieces of it flying, and burst into flames.

In the hours after the division’s 2nd Brigade rolled into Baghdad, at least six other cars sped toward U.S. tank positions despite warning shots, most of them barreling across the 14th of July Boulevard Bridge, which spans the Tigris River. In several other instances, drivers stopped at the warning shots. One of them ran away cradling a baby, without coming under fire.

With parts of Baghdad now in U.S. hands, the remainder of the war in Iraq could evolve into an insurgency by remnants of irregular forces and Hussein’s military. Outside Baghdad, U.S. and British troops already have faced suicide bombings, attacks by Iraqis who were pretending to surrender and by others wearing civilian clothes.

In Baghdad on Monday, Republican Guard and Baath Party irregulars soon regrouped, launching rocket-propelled grenades from positions close to the bridge, where tanks from the 4th Battalion, 64th Armored Regiment bulldozed destroyed cars into a blockade.

U.S. troops suspected the drivers of the cars that came speeding at them were trying to carry out suicide attacks. Capt. Steven Barry, commander of Cyclone Company, said after one of the vehicles exploded Monday that “normal cars don’t burn like that.”

But the driver of the Caprice survived. Waving a towel, he crawled from the wreckage and lay on the sidewalk, his face blackened, shrapnel wounds through his legs.

“I put about 200 rounds through his windshield from 500 meters,” said Sgt. Derrick January, 31, of Missouri, the gunner for the tank. “I hit him at 175 meters with a HEAT round. Allah was thinking of him today.”

Sgt. Luther Robinson, a 31-year-old medic from North Carolina, stabilized the driver, who motioned weakly with his injured arms.

“That’s the luckiest man I’ve seen in Iraq yet,” Robinson said after packing the driver in an ambulance for a nearby surgical station. He said the unidentified man, who looked to be in his 40s, had a decent chance of surviving.

The Iraqis switched to other tactics as the U.S. armor settled in on the west side of the Tigris River. One fighter fired rocket-propelled grenades from one side of a bridge, dodged under it, emerged on the other side, and fired repeatedly from behind light posts. He apparently got away despite heavy return fire from two tanks.

One of his grenades glanced off a tank and struck a street sign in a traffic circle, anchored by a monument to fallen soldiers. The blast sent shrapnel over nearby troops and reporters.

Those attacks came hours after resistance at a nearby presidential palace’s gate, a massive yellow-brick arch, seemed to have subsided. But tank troops searched through dozens of hidden bunkers in an overgrown lot of palm and eucalyptus trees well into the afternoon and continued to find fighters. Many of the Iraqis emerged shaking and clutching copies of the Koran. Half of them were in civilian clothes; others wore the dark green uniform of the Republican Guards.

They struggled to communicate to itchy U.S. troops that they could not put the Koran down on the dirt as they lay down to be searched.

Sgt. Anthony J. Smith, a 35-year-old tank commander from New Jersey, was in charge of patting down prisoners and cuffing them with plastic bands. “Saddam good or bad?” he yelled at one prisoner, who didn’t answer.

“This is a good thing for you; you’re going to live,” Smith said.

One prisoner, lying on his stomach, held his Koran out in front of him. Smith had the prisoner show him that it was a book by opening it. Smith then took the book, made sure it wasn’t a bomb, put it in a plastic bag and gave it back to the prisoner.

“The thing is, they did the right thing,” said Smith. “Better to surrender today and live tomorrow than fight today and die today.” Smith’s tank stood at the curb, about 25 feet away.

The Iraqi soldiers appeared to have been living in squalor, with filthy clothes and bedding, eating moldy rolls and dried dates. The newest items were their rocket-propelled grenades, many of them with serial numbers in the Cyrillic alphabet, indicating that they likely were from Russia or the former Soviet Union. Scores of them were found in bunkers across from the palace entry.

None of the prisoners, who numbered more than a dozen, spoke much English. But a Libyan interpreter with the Americans, who identified himself as Abdul, said of the prisoners: “They are all so shocked at two things -- that the Americans could take Baghdad so easily, and that they would give them medical care, food and water. They say Allah is watching over them. One guy, he said he was so grateful to the Americans for treating him well that he would take a gun and fight for us.”

Nearby, Barry, the Cyclone Company commander, shook his head at the condition of his adversaries, whose weapons proved no match for the heavy armor of his M-1A1 Abrams tanks. “I don’t understand why they fight for that man,” he said of Hussein. “They should’ve just turned in their weapons and gone home. I don’t understand it.”

As dusk fell, tanks took up defensive positions. There were sporadic bursts of intense fire, much of it coming from the Americans. But soldiers appeared fairly relaxed, and talk turned to the prospect of going home soon.

Two Marines attached to the 2nd Brigade focused on the possibility of a counterattack. They climbed cluttered staircases to the top of the arch, where two bomb-blasted antiaircraft guns were still perched, and began taking laser measurements along the broad avenues leading out from the palace site.

“We’re going to pick what we would do if we were them and prepare a defense,” said Marine Maj. Mark Jewell, a liaison officer.

Jewell and Marine Capt. David Cooper, his face still cut by grenade shrapnel, surveyed the turrets and spires of the palace compound, the bridge and the boulevards, jotting down grids in case they needed to call in bombing raids.

Down below, the shattered body of a Republican Guard lay in the dusky shadows of the arch.

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Times staff writer David Zucchino contributed to this report.