Battle for Baghdad Intensifies

U.S. forces extended their control in the Iraqi capital Tuesday as Marines captured a second Baghdad airport along with large sections of the eastern suburbs and Army tanks attacked government buildings and repelled sharp counterattacks near the heart of the city.

Hours after punching their way into Baghdad, the Marines took over a prison, where they discovered bloodied U.S. Army uniforms, along with chemical weapons suits, which might have belonged to Americans.

Troops of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force seized the Rashid military airport on the southeastern edge of Baghdad after destroying tanks and armored personnel carriers in front and behind it, said Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command in Doha, Qatar.

He said U.S. control of the air base, along with the capture of Baghdad airport last week, would help prevent the escape of high-ranking Iraqi officials.

Meanwhile, forces loyal to President Saddam Hussein turned increasingly to fierce urban combat amid reports of heavy civilian casualties.

In southern Iraq, British and U.S. commanders said they had cleared the last pocket of resistance in Basra. They said British troops who now control Iraq’s second-largest city had begun talks with local representatives about forming a provisional government.

The increased American control of Baghdad gave commanders a growing sense of success. With Army soldiers and Marines inside the city, Special Forces troops to the north, a large element of Marines to the southeast and two big Army units to the southwest, one officer noted that time seemed to be running out for Hussein and his government.

U.S. officials said they did not know whether the Iraqi leader and his sons, Uday and Qusai, had been killed in the heavy bombing Monday of a residential neighborhood in Baghdad where the CIA said the three had been meeting with Iraqi intelligence officials. One U.S. official said they might have been “vaporized” by four massive bombs.

The neighborhood was in Iraqi control, and American commanders said they could not immediately determine whether any of the remains belonged to the Iraqi leader.

Several London newspapers, including the Guardian, said British intelligence sources told them they believe that Hussein had left the meeting before the bombs struck and probably survived the attack. But the reports could not be confirmed.

In Tuesday’s fighting, the Marines suffered 11 casualties, including one death, bringing the number of U.S. deaths in the war to 99. Three American planes were hit by ground fire. Two managed to return to their bases, but the third, an A-10 Warthog attack jet, crashed at the main Baghdad airport. The pilot ejected and was saved by U.S. rescue crews.

An Air Force F-15E strike aircraft was lost over Iraq on Monday and its two-member crew was missing, a Central Command spokesman said today. He provided no details.

At one point, shortly before noon Tuesday, the battle turned deadly for noncombatants.

American tanks on one of the bridges across the Tigris River fired a round into the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, where many foreign journalists covering the war live and work. U.S. munitions also hit offices of the pan-Arab satellite television network Al Jazeera. The news bureau of Abu Dhabi television also was hit.

Three journalists -- cameraman Taras Protsyuk with the Reuters news agency, cameraman Jose Couso with Spain’s Telecinco television and correspondent Tariq Ayyoub with Al Jazeera -- were killed. Three others were wounded.

Journalists strenuously rejected the initial explanation provided by military officials at Central Command that the Americans had fired only after receiving small-arms fire from the hotel lobby. The journalists said tank rounds had hit the hotel’s 15th floor.

U.S. spokesman Brooks called the incident “most unfortunate indeed” and insisted: “We certainly know that we don’t target journalists.”

A reporter for the Los Angeles Times, traveling with the tank unit that mounted the fire, said there appeared to have been confusion about the location of attackers. In addition, commanders of the tank unit had received intelligence that Iraqi spotters had climbed to the rooftops of buildings in the area to direct fire onto the tank positions.

About that time, the Times reporter said, someone -- possibly a journalist -- in the upper stories of the Palestine Hotel was spotted looking out at the tanks through binoculars. The tank round that crashed into the hotel’s 15th floor was fired shortly afterward.

A few hours later, officers in the 4th Battalion, 64th Armored Regiment, reportedly engaged in a long discussion on how to differentiate between the Palestine Hotel and the Iraqi Intelligence Ministry across the Tigris.

At one point, an Associated Press reporter attached to the tank unit telephoned his colleagues at the Palestine and asked them to hang a sheet out a window to make it clear which building was the hotel.

The attack on the journalists highlighted a larger problem: civilian casualties throughout Baghdad. The Iraqis have said that at least 1,261 civilians have been killed and more than 5,000 wounded in the war. The toll was expected to rise sharply as urban fighting intensified.

Hospitals in Baghdad were reported to be overwhelmed with wounded. A spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross said the large Al Kindi Hospital was admitting an average of 10 new wounded each hour.

Nine or 10 civilians reportedly were killed in the air attack that targeted Hussein and his sons, and four others were wounded.

In the battle for Baghdad, the 1st Marine Division overcame stiff resistance from Iraqi units in fighting at a bridge over the Diyala River. Iraqi armor on the west side of the river was destroyed, and many of the defenders fled.

By nightfall, the Marines, driving from the southeast, were deep inside Baghdad, and shortly after dawn today they launched a heavy artillery assault on Iraqi fighters in the city.

They followed the artillery barrage with a street-by-street effort to clear out snipers.

In central Baghdad, the 4th Battalion came under fire on Haifa Street about 7 a.m. today. The troops determined that the attack came from a mosque, apparently in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

They searched the mosque and found two men and a boy, along with two grenade launchers, four grenades and an AK-47 assault rifle. They also found uniforms and bunkers on the grounds of the mosque.

The men said they were hiding inside the mosque when the American troops entered. They were taken into custody.

Not far away, tanks from the 2nd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, attacked several government buildings Tuesday and spread out in what U.S. military sources said was a deliberate attempt to humiliate the Hussein regime and demonstrate its inability to defend the center of the capital.

On the target list were headquarters of Hussein’s ruling Baath Party, as well as his Intelligence and Justice ministries and the headquarters of his Special Republican Guard.

In their battle for the bridge, the Marines rolled past burned-out armored vehicles with bodies scattered across a broad area. The smell of corpses and ammunition was overpowering.

The defenders had included a mix of Republican Guard soldiers and Fedayeen Saddam paramilitary fighters loyal to Hussein, Marine commanders said.

At the bridge, the Marines took sniper fire from the tops of buildings. One Marine was killed and six were wounded, said Lt. Col. Pete Owen, executive officer of the 1st Marine Regiment.

After crossing the bridge, Owen said, his troops engaged in two prolonged firefights in urban areas of Baghdad. “We’re stumbling on pockets of resistance,” he said. “We may need to go block by block.”

The Marines took four casualties inside the city, all from sniper fire.

The Marines were receiving help from residents, said Brig. Gen. John Kelly, deputy commander of the 1st Marine Division. He said the residents were pointing out individual Iraqis he called “regime goons.”

The Marines said they were avoiding the use of some types of cluster ammunition because of possible danger to civilians and to their own troops.

In the city, the Marines found sophisticated fighting holes, tunnels and concrete-lined bunkers, along with caches of food and ammunition. Some of the supplies appeared to be in poor condition.

At some of the defense positions, the Marines found Iraqi uniforms and officer berets, which they took as souvenirs, along with AK-47 assault rifles and eating utensils.

In a telephone interview with reporters at the Pentagon, Lt. Col. Fred Swan, the weapons systems officer on the B-1B warplane that targeted Hussein and his two sons, gave this account of the bombing:

Swan’s plane had just finished refueling in the air over western Iraq when it received an order to fly to the Mansour neighborhood in central Baghdad.

Twelve minutes later, the aircraft dropped four bombs.

Two were standard versions of what is known as the 2,000-pound Joint Direct Attack Munition GBU-31, he said. The others were special bunker-buster versions that penetrate a target before detonating. Early reports had misidentified all four as bunker-busters.

Swan said an airborne air controller had told the crew that its target might be “the big one.” They took that to mean Hussein.

“We thought it was [him], given everything we heard,” Swan said.

He said the B-1B crew did not look at the target after the bombs were released, from 20,000 feet.

But one military official said that if Hussein was in the building when it was hit, it was unlikely that he could have survived. “With what we hit him with,” the official said, “it would have vaporized him.”

Journalists escorted by the Iraqis to the Mansour district found a smoking crater 60 feet deep.

“What we have for battle damage assessment right now is essentially a hole in the ground, a site of destruction where we wanted it to be, where we believed high-value targets were,” Army Maj. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, vice director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the Pentagon.

But, McChrystal added, “we do not have hard battle damage assessment on exactly what individual or individuals were on the site” when the bombs hit. The site is in a “hostile area,” another military official said on condition of anonymity, and U.S. forces have not been able to test any remains.

After the bombing, Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said, orders from the Iraqi command were still being issued to key elements of its military.

Among the units still operating, McChrystal said, were elements of the Republican Guard who appeared to be following orders, possibly from Hussein.

In Basra, British Maj. Gen. Robin Brims met with a local tribal leader to talk about a provisional government for the province, said Col. Chris Vernon, a British military spokesman.

He did not identify the leader. “He does have authority,” Vernon said. “We have heard of him. We came away with the conclusion that he was reliable.”

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Perry reported from the 1st Marine Division and Mohan from the 3rd Infantry Division. Times staff writers Jailan Zayan, Mark Porubcansky and Tyler Marshall in Doha; Alissa J. Rubin in Amman, Jordan, and Esther Schrader in Washington contributed to this report.

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Toll on the battlefield

Casualties

Military totals (as of 7 p.m. Pacific time Tuesday)

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U.S Britain Iraq Killed 99 30 unknown

Missing 10 0 unknown

Captured 7 0 7,000

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Civilian casualties

* Iraq has said at least 1,261 civilians have been killed. In addition, nine journalists have died.