POWs Found; Marines Enter Tikrit

U.S. Marines on Sunday rolled into Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown and the last significant stronghold of his regime, as the military recovered seven American prisoners of war just south of the city and flew them to Kuwait for medical attention, U.S. commanders said.

Three of the POWs had gunshot wounds. “But basically they’re in good shape,” Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in Washington.

In Baghdad, U.S. forces sent forensics teams to analyze remains where warplanes targeted the Iraqi president and his sons, Uday and Qusai, said Army Gen. Tommy Franks, head of U.S. Central Command. He said the analysts could test the remains against DNA samples.

Throughout the capital, looting seemed to ease after four days, and Marine patrols fanned out into residential neighborhoods to ask people what they needed most. Their main concerns, even ahead of obtaining food, the Marines said, were ending the looting altogether and restoring electricity.

For the U.S., those problems were tempered, however, by the assault on Tikrit, which commanders expected to succeed, and by recovery of the prisoners of war. While military officials were reluctant to declare that Iraqi opposition was over, they were convinced that Hussein’s regime no longer had the ability to regroup or to threaten other nations.

In Tikrit, Marine Task Force Tripoli, described as a beefed-up reconnaissance patrol, encountered light to moderate sniper fire from paramilitary fighters as it entered the city from the south, said Lt. Col. Clark Lethin, operations officer for the 1st Marine Division.

“We like it when they do that,” Lethin said. “It gives Marines a chance to go in, kill them and break the back of the opposition.”

The task force, about 200 troops strong, probed the city early today, after artillery and helicopter gunships fired on the outskirts overnight.

Families fled in buses filled with tables and chairs, as well as in Chevrolet and Mercedes sedans filled with children, suitcases and toys. One family hauled out a truckload of sheep.

Most of Hussein’s Republican Guard fled north, leaving hard-line street fighters to defend the city. One Marine commander said that about 2,500 Hussein loyalists had been left behind and might mount fiercer resistance.

The Republican Guard also abandoned a large swath of territory north of the city, including military bases they had occupied along with remaining members of the regular Iraqi army. For 150 miles from an abandoned guard base at Hawa, north of Tikrit, to Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, there was no sign of uniformed soldiers.

Instead, abandoned military trucks and armored vehicles littered the sandy plains. A low, sandbagged bunker next to a road into the base at Hawa clearly had been deserted in a hurry. A soldier’s boots lay discarded on the roof, and a green uniform was left on the floor, next to a chair toppled in the doorway.

Hussein’s dark statue still stood on the front lawn of the base, its arm raised in salute. A sign declared in Arabic: “The Republican Guard is the Guardian of the People.”

Near Hawa, as in virtually every place abandoned by Hussein’s forces, looting broke out almost immediately.

Hundreds of Iraqis, mainly teenagers and young men, scrambled over a high wall around a large armory, where allied bombing had damaged rows of warehouses with guns and ammunition inside. The weapons of choice among the looters appeared to be small machine guns, easily concealed under jackets or inside knapsacks.

The looters were limited only by how many they could carry as they staggered to waiting cars and trucks. Some hauled eight at a time, filling green wooden gun boxes, car trunks and pickup beds -- even a wire basket on the back of a bicycle.

Bridges north of Tikrit were targeted by retreating Iraqi troops, who buckled them upward by setting off explosives underneath, and by allied warplanes trying to strike the Iraqi forces.

The planes hit a small roadside building covered with camouflage netting.

An Iraqi army bus at the side of a highway about 90 miles south of Mosul was engulfed in flames, apparently from an airstrike at the front of the vehicle that blasted out the windows and flattened the tires.

Franks, in an interview, told CNN: “I wouldn’t say it’s over, but I will say we have American forces in Tikrit right now.... There was not any resistance.”

When asked whether this meant that all of Hussein’s military had crumbled, Franks replied: “One would like to think that, but I think we would be premature to say, ‘Well, gosh, it’s all done -- it’s all finished.’ ”

Franks said he would go to Baghdad, probably within a week, with top U.S. military commanders. “I’m not looking to have a victory parade in downtown Baghdad,” he said. But he wanted “to have the best appreciation of what’s going on in the country that I can have.”

The seven American POWs were discovered near the city of Samarra, 30 miles south of Tikrit, when Marines were flagged down by Iraqis who had been guarding them, Lethin said.

“The Marines were pretty damn happy to get them back,” he said.

In Washington, Rumsfeld said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the Marines “were approached and told there were some Americans in a certain location. And they went and found seven American servicemen, and they’re in good health.”

One of the former POWs wore blue prison pajamas, another yellow. Two looked unshaven.

The former POWs were flown by U.S. military helicopter to an airfield south of Baghdad, and then by military cargo plane to Kuwait for medical care, according to a statement from Central Command headquarters in Doha, Qatar.

Five of the seven were soldiers from the Army’s 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, based at Ft. Bliss, Texas, the Pentagon said, and the other two were Apache helicopter crew members, assigned to the 1st Battalion of the Army’s 227th Aviation Regiment from Ft. Hood, Texas.

The Pentagon identified them as Spc. Edgar Hernandez, 21, of Mission, Texas; Spc. Joseph Hudson, 23, of Alamogordo, N.M.; Spc. Shoshana Johnson, 30, of El Paso; Pfc. Patrick Miller, 23, of Park City, Kan.; Sgt. James Riley, 31, of Pennsauken, N.J.; Chief Warrant Officer David S. Williams, 30, of Orlando, Fla.; and Chief Warrant Officer Ronald D. Young Jr., 26, of Lithia Springs, Ga.

Williams and Young were captured March 23 after their helicopter went down in central Iraq. The others, members of a combat support unit, were captured in an ambush, also on March 23, after they took a wrong turn near Nasiriyah, in southeastern Iraq. Eight members of the unit were killed.

Johnson was shot with a single bullet that passed through both of her feet, Hernandez was hit in the bicep of his right arm and Hudson was shot three times, twice in the ribs and once in the upper left buttock.

All seven of the POWs were displayed on Iraqi television after their capture. Images of the five from the 507th were especially detailed. Each captive, bruised or bleeding, was shown being interviewed by the Iraqis and nervously answering questions about who they were and why they were in Iraq.

The family of Pfc. Jessica Lynch, another member of the combat support unit who was captured, expressed joy that her fellow soldiers were free. Lynch was rescued April 1 by U.S. commandos in a daring raid on an Iraqi hospital. She is listed in satisfactory condition at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

In interviews with reporters from the Washington Post and the Miami Herald aboard the C-130 transport plane that took them to Kuwait, several of the seven recovered prisoners described their capture and imprisonment.

Johnson recalled turning the wrong way and getting lost.

Suddenly, Riley said, “we were like Custer. We were surrounded.... We couldn’t even make a bayonet charge. We would have been mowed down.”

Miller recounted that he held out little hope for mercy. “I thought they were going to kill me,” he said. “That was the first thing I asked when they captured me.

“ ‘Are you going to kill me?’

“They said, ‘No.’

“I still didn’t believe them.”

The former POWs said they were taken to Baghdad, where they were isolated in separate prison cells, stripped and given the pajamas. Two or three times a day, they said, they received tea and bowls of rice, pita bread, sometimes chicken.

At first, their guards were cruel and menacing, they said, but physical abuse finally subsided.

Within a day or two, the helicopter crew members were brought to the prison. They said they had run from the wreckage of their Apache and jumped into a canal, then swam as quietly as they could for a quarter of a mile.

Afraid of hypothermia, they climbed out of the water and broke for a line of trees, but farmers with rifles spotted them. The farmers fired warning shots, the two crewmen said, and they surrendered.

“They beat us a little,” Williams said. “One of them had a stick. Ron they kicked and beat. They took a knife and put it to my throat.”

The farmers tied their hands, Williams said, blindfolded them and loaded them into a truck. On the way to show Iraqi authorities their prize, they stopped now and then to display the two crewmen to other Iraqis.

As U.S. forces advanced on Baghdad, the seven were taken from their prison and moved every few nights. They said they stayed at seven or eight places, sometimes government buildings, sometimes private homes. “We were a hot potato,” Johnson said.

“We could feel that the whole thing was collapsing,” Young said. “We were the bastard children of Iraq. Nobody wanted to hold us.”

In his interview with CNN, Franks said that the DNA samples from Iraqi leaders might determine whether Hussein and his sons were killed in two airstrikes aimed specifically at them. He did not say how the United States had obtained the samples.

On the first day of the war, U.S. forces launched cruise missiles and dropped bunker-busting bombs on a residential compound in Baghdad where the three were thought to have been holed up.

One week ago, a B-1B warplane dropped two standard 2,000-pound bombs and two bunker-buster versions on a building in another Baghdad neighborhood where the CIA said all three were meeting with intelligence advisors.

For days, the latter neighborhood remained in Iraqi hands. But now, Franks said, “the appropriate people with the appropriate forensics are doing checks ... in each of the places where we think we may have killed regime leadership.

“We have the forensics capability to chase these things down.”

As the Iraqi capital struggled with restoring civil order, a team of 32 U.S. Army engineers landed at Baghdad airport to help restore electricity.

Water service was out in much of the city.

Two power plants, bombed by U.S. warplanes, have been further damaged by looting, the Marines said. One estimate was that it might take months for power to be fully restored.

“The problem,” said Capt. Aaron Robertson, a Marine intelligence officer, “is that before too long [Iraqis] are going to become tired of our presence if they don’t start seeing positive signs of support, like electricity and clean water.”

Robertson said civil order and electricity outranked even food among the concerns that Baghdad residents expressed when they were surveyed by his intelligence teams.

In an interview with Fox News, Franks acknowledged that some Iraqi leaders might flee the country -- or perhaps already had done so -- but he said U.S. officials were confident that these leaders were no longer a threat to other nations.

“We wanted to isolate the centers of power,” Franks said. “We believe that that isolation occurred in such a way that the leaders of this country may have an opportunity for one or five or 55 of them to escape, but not to move [weapons of mass destruction] outside the country.”

Franks told CNN that members of the Iraqi leadership “absolutely” had fled to Syria.

In an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Rumsfeld declined to say what Washington might do if Hussein were found in Syria.

Franks and Rumsfeld said “busloads” of Syrian fighters have been killed or captured by U.S. forces in Iraq and that the United States believes the Syrians were paid substantial amounts by Iraqi authorities to try to repel the allied advance north through the country.

Returning to the White House from a weekend at Camp David, President Bush cautioned Syria not to harbor Iraqi officials “who need to be held to account.” Bush also accused Syria of developing chemical weapons. “We’re serious about stopping weapons of mass destruction,” he said.

Rumsfeld said Syria “is making a lot of bad mistakes, a lot of bad judgments, in my view.” If Hussein turned up in Syria, he added, it would show that “Syria would have made an even bigger mistake.”

Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shareh told reporters from the Reuters news service Saturday that U.S. accusations were baseless.

“I am telling you now,” Shareh said, “because [the Bush administration] failed, they are trying to pinpoint at a third country, perhaps Syria or another country.”

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Casualties

Military (as of 8 p.m. Pacific time Sunday)

*--*

U.S Britain Iraq Killed 117 31 unknown

Missing 4 0 unknown

Captured 0 0 7,300

*--*

Civilian

* Before the government dissolved last week, Iraq said at least 1,261 civilians had been killed. In addition, nine journalists and an aid worker have been killed.

Los Angeles Times

*

Perry reported with the 1st Marine Division and Watson from Hawa, Iraq. Times staff writers Tracy Wilkinson in Doha and Esther Schrader and Robin Wright in Washington contributed to this report.