American ground forces were close to seizing Saddam International Airport on the outskirts of Baghdad last night after slicing rapidly through Republican Guard opposition to come within 10 kilometres of the city, US military officials said.
According to some reports from the scene, the 3rd Infantry Division had already seized the airport after encountering minimal resistance from Iraqi positions.
Early today 16 large explosions rocked central Baghdad, shortly after a series of blasts was heard coming from the direction of the airport. CNN reported early this morning that loudspeakers in Baghdad were urging civilians to go to the airport to defend it.
As many as 80 Iraqis, some of them civilians, were reported to have been killed at the village of Furat near the airport in what witnesses described as a US rocket attack.
”We saw a pile of dead bodies at one of the four hospitals where the victims were taken. Most of them appeared to be military,” said Nadim Ladki, a Reuters correspondent. Iraqi officials claimed five US tanks and a helicopter had been captured in fighting at another nearby village.
The move on the airport came hours after a power cut plunged Baghdad into darkness for the first time since the war began. The US military leadership denied intentionally causing the power failure, which followed 15 minutes of loud explosions, but it prompted intense speculation that coalition forces had dropped a ”blackout bomb” on Baghdad to allow special forces troops to operate freely.
Military sources in Qatar said that dozens of British and American special forces teams poured into the city last night after the power went down. In the darkness special forces teams were said to be under instructions to hit key Iraqi military positions and to hunt down potential regime targets.
General Richard Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, told reporters: ”Central command has not targeted the power grid in Baghdad.” But it is understood that before the attack on Baghdad airport last night, coalition forces had considered using the weapon – a bomb loaded with carbon filaments that temporarily short circuit power supplies.
US forces used the bomb during the Kosovo conflict, but faced criticism because it also affects the civilian population, including hospital equipment and incubators.
In punishing temperatures that reached 38C (100F) inside the Americans’ Bradley armoured vehicles, troops from the 3rd Infantry Division clashed for hours with Republican Guard soldiers and regular Iraqi forces in skirmishes outside Baghdad. At least 22 Iraqi fighting vehicles were destroyed in a battle that also saw at least one US soldier killed in ”friendly fire” and three collapsing from heat exhaustion.
From the south, hundreds of US military vehicles swept along roads lined with boots and uniforms apparently abandoned by Iraqi soldiers. But after an advance so speedy it seemed to surprise coalition war planners, they were faced with a decision: maintain the momentum with a fast but risky entry into the capital, or let the pressure build while they wait for reinforcements.
Reports of Republican Guard units redeploying from the north for a confrontation in the capital only heightened the sense that a scheme to lure US forces into a bloody urban battle might be afoot.
Units of the US 3rd Infantry Division rolled east across the Euphrates river, defeating an Iraqi attempt to defend a bridge at the town of Mussayib, and reportedly leaving dozens of Iraqi soldiers dead by the side of the road next to their burnt-out vehicles.
The Iraqi information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, flatly denied all reports of US progress. ”They are not even 100 miles” from Baghdad, he said. ”They are not anywhere. They are like a snake moving in the desert. They have no foothold in Iraq. Their lies are endless.”
At Camp Lejeune base in North Carolina President Bush said: ”The vice is closing, and the days of the brutal regime are coming to an end.”
His defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed US forces were ”closer to the centre of the Iraqi capital than many American commuters are from their downtown offices”.
Central command said there was ”credible evidence” that Saddam’s forces were on the brink of collapse, and Group Captain Al Lockwood, a British spokesman, said that, in Baghdad, ”they are in a position from which there is no escape”.
Before the ”friendly fire” incident, involving a tank, US commanders yesterday said they had ploughed through two Republican Guard divisions without losing a soldier as they approached Baghdad.
Many of the Iraqi soldiers south of the city appeared to have surrendered during the US push; others may have pulled back to Baghdad or put down their weapons and walked home. A senior official at central command said: ”There are those who have been killed, those who have capitulated and those who have slipped off into the hills.”
But behind the scenes it remained unclear whether the lack of resistance from Repub lican Guard troops signalled their imminent capitulation or an attempt to retreat, perhaps in civilian guise, back to Baghdad to draw the US into lengthy urban warfare there.
Gen Myers suggested that US forces might neither storm the city nor stage a conven tional siege, instead isolating the city while instigating a new administration in Iraq.
”When you get to the point where Baghdad is isolated … whatever’s happening inside Baghdad is almost irrelevant compared to what’s going on in the rest of the country.” – Guardian Unlimited Â