US troops sweep through Baghdad's southern suburbs

United States tanks and armoured vehicles made a bold incursion into Baghdad and swept through southern suburbs of the Iraqi capital, neutralising intermittent resistance by President Saddam Hussein’s loyalists.

In a foray that went into early today, US Marines raided a town which contained a suspected weapons of mass destruction site, dating back to 1991, US military officials said.

The US Marines destroyed the headquarters for the Republican Guard Second Corps in the town on the Tigris River south of Baghdad.

They also destroyed what Marines were told was a terrorist training camp and seized one of the Iraqi president’s palaces. No other details were available about those sites.

Yesterday morning’s quick surge through Baghdad’s south west quadrant – at one point passing about two miles from a presidential palace and the Baath Party headquarters – was resisted by individual fighters with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.

The Americans took no territory. The aim, according to US officials, was to send a message to regime loyalists that the city – nearly encircled by American forces – could be breached at any time of the coalition’s choosing.

The New York Times, on its Web site, and Fox News quoted US officials as saying at least 1,000 Iraqis and one US soldier were killed.

US Central Command in Qatar said it had no reports of casualties.

Greg Kelly, a reporter for Fox News embedded with the 3rd Infantry Division, said Iraqi vehicles played a game of chicken with the Americans, speeding toward them at speeds of 80 mph or more before they were dispatched with US firepower.

National Public Radio’s Ann Garrells reported from Baghdad that the US forces - 26 M-1 tanks and 10 Bradley armoured vehicles with the 3rd Infantry’s 2nd brigade – lost one tank and an armoured vehicle, but that the Iraqis lost many more.

The attack on the town south of Baghdad by the Marines’ 3rd Battalion, 7th Infantry and special operations forces began last night and was completed by this morning.

Afterward, Iraqi forces abandoned trenches that had been reinforced with sandbags and sandbag nests on roofs.

US forces have troops stationed around three-quarters of Baghdad’s perimeter: the 3rd Infantry Division along the south and south west edges of the city 1st Division Marines on both sides of the Tigris to the south east and – according to a US military official – at key points just to the north and north west. That leaves only the north east arc around Baghdad free of American forces.

The air bombardment of Baghdad, meanwhile, did not slacken. Warplanes dropped laser-guided bombs on tanks, artillery and Republican Guard buildings.

Pilots said the sky over Baghdad has become congested with coalition planes and they are more worried about crashing into one another than about being hit by the city’s air defences, which they can generally avoid.

“You have to keep your eyeballs out for the other guys,” said Lt Cmdr John Enfield, an F/A-18 Hornet pilot aboard the carrier USS Kitty Hawk in the Persian Gulf.

The destruction caused from the air and on the ground was everywhere to see. Marine casualty and evacuation helicopters flew over crumpled bodies, charred tanks, collapsed buildings and a burning date tree forest.

The pilots of Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 364 flew on repeated missions to Baghdad’s outskirts, picking up war wounded and taking them to emergency medical centres to the south.

One helicopter carried a five-year-old boy whose face had been blown away by shrapnel.

His father, wounded in the shoulder, held the IV as the Marines loaded them both on the helicopter. On another run, six Iraqis were evacuated. When a Marine cut open the clothes of one, he exposed a military uniform underneath.

There was fighting all over the Iraqi map on Saturday. To the south, coalition aircraft struck the Basra villa of General Ali Hassan al-Majid – known as “Chemical Ali” for ordering a poison gas attack that killed thousands of Kurds in 1988.

To the north, Americans supporting Kurdish fighters took up positions in the no-man’s-land south of the Kurdish autonomous region.

Just south of the Baghdad city line, Marines with bayonets struggled in the reeds to subdue a force of foreign fighters, mostly Jordanians, Egyptians and Sudanese who had been “given a rifle and told to become a martyr,” said Lt Col B P McCoy, commanding officer of the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines.

Farther south, amid the smoke of trenches of oil set afire by the Iraqis, Marines pressed past clusters of refugees on foot, begging for water.

Bodies of Iraqi fighters were scattered along the road. But Marines said that at one point they came across four seemingly lifeless men who suddenly came to life, fighting.

As other Marine units advanced north, Iraqi civilian vehicles fled south, packed with bundles and bearing improvised white flags made from torn-up towels or T-shirts.

According to MSNBC, the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines south of Baghdad made an extraordinary discovery – 120 bunkers full of ammunition from Russia, Jordan, Egypt and the United States, evidently from when America backed Iraq in its war with Iran in the 1980s. The huge cache is being tested for biological and chemical agents.

Some 35 miles south east of the city, at Suwayrah, two tank companies and an infantry company of the 3rd Infantry Division rolled unopposed through the headquarters of the Republican Guard’s Medina Division.

They passed hundreds of bunkers and foxholes and dozens of artillery pieces, anti-aircraft gun, tanks and armoured personnel carriers -- all abandoned.

Hundreds of young men in civilian clothes waved as US troops drove by - members of the Republican Guard who had tossed away their uniforms, the Americans believed.

Inside, they found a memo with an elaborate border around it and instructions on how to deal with the US attack.

First: “don’t panic, don’t act stupidly".

Like much of the military activity around Baghdad, the move on the Medina Division headquarters appeared aimed at preventing Republican Guard forces from regrouping to the rear of coalition troops, so they could focus on Baghdad in coming days.

Other troops with the 3rd Infantry Division engaged Republican Guard fighter southwest of Baghdad, moving toward the guard’s barracks from Baghdad’s international airport. They were met with resistance from small ammunition arms and snipers.

“We’re defending the airport from the movement, coming into Baghdad, and basically we’re searching and attacking up the road,” battalion commander Lt. Col. Scott Rutter told Associated Press Television News.

US forces shored up their control of the airport itself, storming the main commercial area, which consists of three terminals and a parking garage. The area appeared to have been abandoned some time ago.

Commanders posted 24 hour guards at the airport duty-free shop, to prevent any looting of alcohol.

Major Gen. Gene Renuart of the U.S. Central Command said officials expected to have one of the airport’s two runways operational “very rapidly”.