- BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A U.S.
armored force punched into the heart of Baghdad on Monday and won a stronghold
in one of President Saddam Hussein's palaces, while British paratroopers
walked unopposed into the center of Iraq's second city of Basra where residents
warmly welcomed them.
-
- The U.S. military said the assault on central Baghdad
by over 100 tanks and armored vehicles was a show of force, designed to
demonstrate that troops could enter the capital at will, rather than a
final attack on the city of 5 million.
-
- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he did not know
what had happened to Saddam or where he was but asserted that he no longer
ran much of Iraq and was running out of soldiers.
-
- "There are three possibilities: He's either dead
or injured or not willing to show himself," Rumsfeld told a news briefing
in Washington.
-
- Iraqi state-run television on Monday showed footage of
Saddam, wearing military fatigues, and his son Qusay meeting top aides.
It was not clear when the meeting took place.
-
- As darkness fell on Baghdad, U.S. troops remained in
the presidential compound on the west bank of the Tigris river, apparently
determined to stay the night and deliver a powerful message to citizens
and Saddam loyalists that his time was almost done.
-
- U.S. troops found suspected chemical weapons in a central
Iraqi town but an officer later suggested they might turn out to be pesticides
rather than banned weapons.
-
- The United States and Britain launched the war on Iraq
on March 20 to oust Saddam and rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction,
which Iraq denied possessing.
-
- Maj. Michael Hamlet of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division
told Reuters that initial investigations of 14 barrels found at a military
training camp on Sunday revealed levels of nerve agents sarin and tabun
and the blister agent lewisite.
-
- CHEMICAL WEAPONS OR PESTICIDES?
-
- But Gen. Benjamin Freakly, also of the 101st Airborne,
said later that tests on substances at the camp and a separate agricultural
site, both in the town of Albu Mahawish, could show they had a less sinister
purpose.
-
- "This could be either some kind of pesticide,"
Freakly told CNN. "On the other hand it could be a chemical agent
-- not weaponized, a liquid agent that is in drums."
-
- British military officials said they believed they had
found the body of Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam's cousin and a member of
his close entourage known as "Chemical Ali," in the rubble of
a home destroyed during an air raid on the southern city of Basra on Saturday.
-
- Majid ear ned his nickname for ordering poison gas attacks
on Kurds in the 1980s and was Saddam's military commander in the south.
"We believe that the reign of terror of Chemical Ali has come to an
end," Rumsfeld said.
-
- In Basra, about 700 British soldiers walked past the
bodies of Iraqi militiamen and entered the city in the early afternoon
in single-file columns.
-
- Not a shot was fired as men, women and children came
out onto the road, some to greet the new occupiers. Others begged the troops
for water.
-
- Throughout Iraq, there were reports of looting and lawlessness
in areas evacuated by Saddam loyalists. On Basra's outskirts, youths carted
looted furniture and appliances away in wheelbarrows and trailers.
-
- As U.S. Marines in tanks headed into Baghdad, looters
who had grabbed the contents of a machinery warehouse headed in the opposite
direction with their spoils, reported Reuters correspondent Matthew Green
traveling with the Marines.
-
- Small arms fire and explosions echoed through the southern
city of Nassiriya after dark. U.S. forces said it was in-fighting among
Iraqis.
-
- It was not known whether the fighting was linked with
the reported arrival in Nassiriya of several hundred anti-Saddam Iraqi
opposition fighters headed by Ahmad Chalabi, the best-known leader of the
Iraqi National Congress. The fighters planned to parade through the town
on Tuesday.
-
- U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard
Myers said Iraqi resistance was sporadic and not coherent.
-
- "Of the 800-plus tanks they began with, all but
a couple of dozen have been destroyed or abandoned," Myers said.
-
- Preliminary reports of U.S. dead in the attack were in
the single digits. Two Marines were killed and three wounded, apparently
by friendly fire, in a fierce battle for two river bridges in the east.
Two more U.S. soldiers and two journalists were killed and 15 people wounded
in an Iraqi attack on a communications center in the southern outskirts
of Baghdad.
-
- In Baghdad, hospitals battled with a constant stream
of civilian dead and injured. Doctors said they were running short of anesthetics
and medical equipment.
-
- HOUSE FLATTENED, IRAQIS KILLED
-
- Nine Iraqis, including a baby, were killed when two houses
were flattened in a smart suburb of western Baghdad in what witnesses said
was a U.S. air raid.
-
- At the Kadhimiya hospital in the north of Baghdad, doctors
said they had taken in 18 dead and 142 injured in two days, while the Kindi
hospital had four dead and 176 injured.
-
- The fiercest fighting in Baghdad was concentrated around
two bridges over the Diyala river, a tributary of the Tigris, after Iraqi
defenders blew two large holes in them on Sunday.
-
- "We had our machine guns, mortars and artillery
firing. We did it the old-fashioned way," said U.S. Col. B. P. McCoy.
-
- A defiant Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
said the invaders were "committing suicide" at the capital's
gates. But U.S. deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz said in an interview
that Sahaf had made himself "something of a joke."
-
- "Baghdad is safe," he told reporters at the
Palestine hotel. "Their infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds
on the gates of Baghdad ... Don't believe those liars."
-
- U.S. Lt. Col. Pete Bayer told Reuters earlier: "We
have seized the main presidential palace in downtown Baghdad ... There
are two palaces down there and we are in both of them."
-
- With the war apparently nearing a climax, the issue of
how Iraq will be run in a post-Saddam era loomed larger.
-
- British Prime Minister Tony Blair, due to meet President
Bush in Northern Ireland later on Monday, was expected to try to persuade
his U.S. ally to give the United Nations a bigger role in running Iraq
after the war.
|
