Troops Battle Sandstorm, Iraqis

As gritty, blinding sandstorms slowed U.S. and British forces to a crawl on their march toward Baghdad, soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry killed several hundred Iraqi troops during a fierce firefight Tuesday near the town of Najaf in central Iraq, the Pentagon said.

Iraqis struck the cavalry regiment with rocket-propelled grenades and antitank missiles, defense officials said, disabling two Abrams tanks and hitting a Bradley fighting vehicle. Using thermal imaging devices to aim through the flying sand, the 7th Cavalry fired 25-millimeter guns and pushed across the Euphrates River.

No U.S. casualties were reported, defense officials said. Estimates of the Iraqi death toll ranged from 150 to 500 troops. Early reports said the Iraqis were on foot, perhaps a military unit from the town of Al Kut. But the officials said they also could have been regular army or members of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard.

It was a day of fighting across Iraq. British forces mounted an assault to gain control of Basra in the south amid reports of insurrection in the country’s second-largest city. The offensive was aimed at opening a way to bring in water and food for residents. British sources said they found Iraqi war gear that included gas masks.

In the southern city of Nasiriyah, U.S. Marines took over a hospital and confiscated 3,000 Iraqi chemical protection suits and masks, as well as what appeared to be a cache of atropine, used in cases of chemical poisoning. Marine Lt. Col. Royal Mortenson said they captured 270 Iraqi fighters and 200 weapons.

Early today, U.S. warplanes struck the state-run television station in Baghdad. Flames and smoke billowed out. Afterward, the station broadcast without sound, showing shaky old footage praising Hussein. Before, it had carried a message it said was from Hussein to clan leaders urging them to fight the coalition for “faith and jihad.”

Uncounted Iraqis have been killed and more than 3,500 captured in the war to drive Hussein from power and disarm his nation. U.S. defense officials said thousands of Iraqis have deserted. Twenty U.S. troops have been killed and 14 have been captured or reported missing.

After receiving an update Tuesday from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his generals at the Pentagon, President Bush told reporters: “Our coalition is on a steady advance. We cannot know the duration of this war. Yet we know its outcome: We will prevail.

“The Iraqi regime will be ended. The Iraqi people will be free. And our world will be more secure and peaceful.”

The sandstorms, expected to blow for two days, dramatically slowed the U.S. and British advance at the Karbala Gap, just 60 miles south of Baghdad. Beyond the gap, located in mountains near the town of Karbala, the Medina Division of the Republican Guard stood between the allies and the Iraqi capital.

After first slowing and then merely inching forward, the U.S. 1st Marine Division and the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division ground to a halt in the area. Troops were ordered to stay inside their vehicles overnight to avoid getting lost in the blowing sand. But early today, after strong wind and rain, the Marines rolled on.

“It’s been a real annoyance, but I wouldn’t call it a setback,” said Col. Robert Knapp, commander of the 1st Marine Division’s Headquarters Battalion. “It may have slowed our pace, but we’re still attacking. Our orders are to get to Baghdad as expeditiously as possible, and that’s what we’re doing.”

U.S. intelligence agencies believe the Republican Guard might use chemical weapons as coalition forces approach the capital, Rumsfeld said. But he said he did not know whether the agencies’ information is correct. Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said U.S. forces have plans “to deal with that.”

Myers said the Republican Guard appears to be tightly deployed around Baghdad. That, he said, is “where the difficult task begins.”

To the south, conditions in Basra appeared chaotic.

During the opening days of the war, coalition forces had bypassed the city as they rolled north. But they then found themselves under attack from the rear.

On Tuesday, the British moved on Basra from the north, west and south and engaged in fierce battles with about 1,000 Iraqi paramilitary fighters and a re-formed contingent of the Iraqi 51st Mechanized Division.

The division had disintegrated as a fighting unit during an early skirmish as allied forces rolled past, and some soldiers had fled into the city with tanks and armored vehicles.

A reconstituted unit of the 51st, augmented by Fedayeen Saddam guerrillas loyal to Hussein, used those weapons to fire on the British on Tuesday, reportedly killing two of them.

During the fighting, U.S. F/A-18 warplanes dropped satellite-guided bombs into downtown Basra, aimed at military sites hidden in civilian buildings.

The British forces raided headquarters of Hussein’s ruling Baath Party in the suburb of Al Zubayr, killing 20 Fedayeen guerrillas and capturing a man described by the British as the second in command of the Baath Party in Basra.

Hours later, a battalion-sized Iraqi contingent of regular and guerrilla troops mounted a counterattack, said Col. Chris Vernon, spokesman for British forces in Kuwait City.

He said more U.S. warplanes were called in and destroyed 20 Iraqi armored vehicles.

Vernon said British troops did not enter the city but probed its edges, attacking Iraqi fighters and armor where they could and destroying selected targets with artillery.

Small groups of Fedayeen fighters, he said, “were coming out of town with civilians in front, firing at us when we can’t fire back, then just running back into town. We’re not firing into the center of the city” to avoid killing civilians.

The sharp clashes came amid reports that an uprising may have broken out in Basra against Hussein loyalists.

Some reports described the civil unrest as thousands of residents rampaging through the streets, setting dozens of buildings ablaze. At least 12 civilians were said to have died, but there were reports of higher casualties.

Part of the unrest apparently targeted supporters of Hussein’s Sunni Muslim regime, which crushed a Shiite Muslim rebellion in Basra at the time of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, killing thousands.

Maj. Gen. Peter Wall, chief of staff of British forces in Iraq, told reporters: “I can confirm that we have had reports that have been building over the last three or four hours that there is some sort of uprising going on in the city of Basra.

“We certainly want to give the local population every encouragement to do this. I think it could be the beginning of something important.”

Wall indicated that British troops might respond to assist the rebels.

A full-scale uprising to overthrow the Baathist leadership would be a major windfall for the U.S.-led campaign. A successful uprising would preclude the need for British forces to subdue the Fedayeen and other paramilitary fighters in block-by-block, house-to-house combat.

At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld said the Fedayeen guerrillas represented a “terrorist-type threat” to coalition forces. He said he was reluctant to explicitly encourage uprisings.

“I guess those of us my age remember uprisings in Eastern Europe back in the 1950s, when they rose up and they were slaughtered,” Rumsfeld said.

“I am very careful about encouraging people to rise up. We know there are people in those cities ready to shoot them if they try to rise up.”

But he added: “Anyone who’s engaged in an uprising has a whole lot of courage, and I sure hope they’re successful.”

Humanitarian aid for Basra, on a British Royal Navy auxiliary ship, was expected to enter the southern Iraqi port of Umm al Qasr on Thursday, after minesweepers clear the harbor.

The coalition also hoped to extend a pipeline from Kuwait to carry water to residents of Basra.

Offshore in the Persian Gulf, commanders on three U.S. carriers were forced to call off numerous airstrikes Tuesday because of the sandstorms.

“We’re not going for indiscriminate drops because you don’t want to hit civilians,” said Lt. Dean Alton of the Black Eagles squadron that operates the U.S. Navy’s version of AWACS -- or Airborne Warning and Control System -- and coordinates battle movements.

“We’ll bring the bombs back rather than drop on an unclear target,” Alton said. Sand distorts target sighting, he said, “like shooting through smoke.”

Carrier-based planes carrying missiles swapped out laser-guided weapons for those using satellite coordinates to find their targets.

Such weapons are unaffected by the weather.

In the north, Iraqi troops dug trenches, spread mines and booby-trapped highways leading to Mosul, the nation’s third-largest city. Paramilitary fighters have set up checkpoints in the city to keep residents and soldiers from fleeing.

Their activities have gone unchecked in part because neighboring Turkey banned coalition forces from entering Iraq from the north.

Nonetheless, Bush asked Congress for $1 billion Tuesday for Turkey. “It’s not compensation,” a senior State Department official said. “It’s acknowledging that Turkey may face costs [because of the war] and that it’s valuable to keep Turkey’s economy from suffering.”

The money was part of a $74.7-billion emergency appropriations request that Bush sent to Congress to pay for the war through September.

Congress might reject the portion for Turkey because of its lack of cooperation, the State Department official said.

“It’s a request, not a commitment,” the official said.

Turkey originally had been offered $6 billion in cash in return for allowing the United States to send 62,000 troops into Iraq to open a northern front.

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Perry reported with the 1st Marine Division and Wharton from Kuwait City. Times staff writers John Daniszewski in Baghdad; Tyler Marshall and Tracy Wilkinson in Doha, Qatar; Paul Watson in Kalak, Iraq; Sam Howe Verhovek and Mark Magnier in Kuwait City; Geoffrey Mohan with the 3rd Infantry Division; Carol J. Williams aboard the carrier Abraham Lincoln; and Robin Wright , Edwin Chen and Esther Schrader in Washington contributed to this report.