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U.S. Troops Continue to Tighten Knot Around Baghdad
Officials Offer Upbeat Assessments

By Terry M. Neal
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Sunday, April 6, 2003; 2:10 PM

U.S. forces continued to tighten the knot around Baghdad today, as military officials offered upbeat assessments of the progress of the war in Iraq and talked about a post-Saddam Hussein reconstruction of the war torn country.

"We are barely past the two weeks of this war, and already we've made enormous progress," said Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who made the rounds on the Sunday morning shows, said on Fox News Sunday. "And Our troops are outside of Baghdad, control Baghdad International Airport. The feared Republican Guard have suffered enormous losses, and it's clear where the end is."

Wolfowitz said Hussein's government may still control parts of Baghdad, but that it was "on its way out, no doubt about it. The end of this regime is here." Asked on Fox whether the Iraqis could set up a new government as quickly as the Kurds set up a territory in northern Iraq they began governing in 1991 after the first Gulf War, Wolfowitz said it would take longer.

"Six months is what happened in northern Iraq," he said. "This is a more complicated situation. It will take more than that."

The U.S. military opened the battle for Baghdad on Saturday by dispatching more than 40 tanks and other armored vehicles through the capital's southwestern quadrant. On Sunday, military officials said that between 2,000 and 3,000 Iraqis had been killed in the operation and that there would be more forays toward the city's center before long.

U.S. forces have formed a loose circle around Baghdad, taking control of most roads to and from the city and seeking to isolate it and block movement of Iraqi troops. Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Join Chiefs of Staff, described the strategy Sunday on ABC's "This Week."

"Baghdad, as you know, is about 15 miles or more east to west and about 15 miles north to south, so to say that you have an impenetrable cordon around the city would be a misstatement," Pace said. "It is certainly true that we have huge amounts of combat power around the city right now, and that we have over a thousand planes in the air every day. So if it moves on the ground and it takes aggressive action, it's going to get killed."

Massive explosions rocked central Baghdad early Sunday as Iraqi troops, members of Hussein's Fedayeen militia and teenage soldiers patrolled streets to protect the capital from U.S.-led forces.

A Marine battalion overran a Republican Guard headquarters and seized one of Saddam's palaces south of the city, according to the Associated Press. Overhead, U.S. warplanes were flying around the clock, coordinating precision strikes in support of upcoming ground.

U.S. officials described the fighting in and around Baghdad as very one-sided.

"In some cases we take a few wounded, and in some cases we have one or two killed," U.S. Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks told reporters at Central Command headquarters in Doha, Qatar, this morning. "But in all cases, we inflict a considerable amount of destruction on whatever force comes into contact with us. It just is not worth trying to characterize by numbers."

But Iraqi officials were defiant.

"This regime will not be defeated by mercenaries, God forbid," Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf told reporters at his daily briefing today.

Iraqi forces showed off a destroyed U.S. tank to reporters on Sunday on a highway leading south out of Baghdad and said four U.S. soldiers had been killed, according to news wire reports. A group of Iraqis chanted "Long live Saddam Hussein" and "Down, down Bush."

Iraqi state television showed brief footage of a smiling Saddam in military uniform presiding at a meeting it said was held Sunday with his top aides, the news service said. Separately, Iraqi TV quoted Saddam as saying anyone who destroys a coalition tank, armored personnel carrier or artillery will receive a $5,000 reward. TV also broadcast a statement attributed to Saddam urging soldiers separated from their regular units to join up with any unit they can find.

The coalition effort to vanquish Iraqi forces north of Baghdad hit a snag today when a convoy of U.S. Special Forces troops, journalists and local residents was hit by a bomb dropped by an American warplane. A Kurdish Party spokesman said at least 12 Kurdish fighters were killed and 45 others were injured.

BBC reporter John Simpson, who was traveling in the convoy, earlier reported that at least 10 people were killed. "This is a just a scene from hell here. There are vehicles on fire, bodies lying around, and there are bits of bodies around me," Simpson said.

U.S. military officials were investigating that incident.

Officials denied U.S. culpability in a separate incident involving an attack on a Russian diplomatic convoy in Iraq in which several people were wounded.

"Initial field reports reveal that no coalition forces were operating in the area of the incident," U.S. Central Command said in a statement.

NBC correspondent David Bloom, embedded with the the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division outside Baghdad, died on Sunday of a pulmonary embolism. He was 39, and is survived by his wife, Melanie, and three daughters.

Meanwhile, British forces, which have surrounded Basra since the war began on March 20, launched an offensive early this morning to take control of the city, Iraq's second largest, according to Group Capt. Al Lockwood, spokesman for British forces.

The British 7 Armored Division is attacking the city on three axes from the southwest while elements of the 3 Commando Brigade are advancing on a broad front from the south, he said. The push involves thousands of British soldiers and the goal is to eliminate remaining elements of the Baath Party and other pro-government militias, Lockwood said. So far, he said, there have been "sporadic skirmishes" rather than serious fighting. Iraqis have not mustered any organized resistance, he said.

"Anyone who's shooting at us, we're shooting back," he said.

British troops in the town of Zubair, about 10 miles southwest of Basra in southern Iraq, said Saturday that they discovered a military warehouse containing the badly decomposed remains of hundreds of people in neatly arranged wooden boxes. One room in the warehouse had meat hooks hanging from the ceiling and another was pockmarked with bullets, according to journalists who visited the site.

There was no indication when the bodies were placed there. Basra and the surrounding marshlands were major battlegrounds during the Iran-Iraq war. In addition, the area's largely Shiite population rose up against Hussein's government after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, provoking a bloody crackdown by the Iraqi army.

Brooks said the site would be investigated to determine if war crimes had been committed there.

Iran claimed that the bodies were Iranian soldiers killed during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, state-run Tehran radio reported Sunday.

"We officially call on the International Committee of the Red Cross to carry out their responsibility and immediately take the bodies from the invading forces and hand them over to the Islamic Republic of Iran," the radio quoted Gen. Mirfeisal Baqerzadeh, the head of Iran's Committee for Searching for the Missing in Action, as saying.

In the town of Aziziyah, about 40 miles southeast of Baghdad, Marines searched a school for possible chemical and biological weapons after receiving a tip from an Iraqi prisoner of war. The prisoner said Iraqi military personnel had recently hidden something in a hole in the school's courtyard and then placed concrete over it.

"We don't have a clue, but we are going to dig it up and see," said Marine Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis.

The Bush administration repeatedly has charged the Iraqi government with producing and maintaining chemical weapons, citing the danger they pose as one reason for the war to destroy Hussein's government. So far, however, no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons have been found. Vials of white powder discovered Friday near the town of Latifiyah were found to contain explosives.

While military commanders had warned that Iraqi Republican Guard forces might use chemical weapons as U.S. forces closed in on Baghdad, U.S. troops advancing on the capital from the south have not encountered or found any such weapons, Brooks said.

"We haven't found anything yet," he told reporters. "We think that the places where it's most likely to be found, we haven't even gotten to most of them yet. There's a considerable number out there where there could be weapons of mass destruction or evidence of weapons of mass destruction programs. So we're not ruling anything out at this point, whether they will be there or not."

In Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, the house of Gen. Ali Hassan Majeed, Hussein's cousin and close confidant, was bombed by two allied warplanes, the Central Command said. It was not clear whether the strike killed Majeed, who is known as "Chemical Ali" because he ordered the use of chemical weapons on Kurds in the country's north who had rebelled in coordination with Iran during the 1980-88 war.

Brooks said on Sunday that the body of Majeed's bodyguard had been recovered from the wreckage, "but as far as Ali, who knows."

Asked whether Chemical Ali had been killed, al-Sahaf told reporters in Baghdad: "Let them [bask] in their illusions."

Washington Post correspondents Alan Sipress, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Keith B. Richburg and William Branigin contributed to this report.

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