- BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S.
troops stormed the heart of Baghdad on Monday, seizing two presidential
palace compounds but losing at least four dead as Iraqi forces fought back.
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- The U.S. military described the assault by more than
100 tanks and armored vehicles as a show of force, rather than a final
attack on the sprawling city of five million, but they remained in the
center of the capital after nightfall.
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- U.S. officers said the assault was intended to prove
to President Saddam Hussein that they could strike at will.
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- Baghdad's hospitals battled with a constant stream of
dead and injured. Doctors said there were so many cases that they were
running short of anesthetics and medical equipment.
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- At the Kadhimiya hospital in the north of Baghdad, doctors
told Reuters correspondent Hassan Hafidh they had taken in 18 dead and
142 injured in the last two days, while the toll at Kindi hospital near
the center was four dead and 176 injured.
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- "Surgeons have been working round the clock for
the past two days and most are exhausted. Conditions are terrible,"
said Roland Huguenin-Benjamin, local spokesman for the International Committee
of the Red Cross.
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- A U.S. armored column blasted into central Baghdad early
on Monday with relative ease, but two Marines were killed and three wounded
in a fierce battle for two river bridges in the east.
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- Marines said their comrades had died in "friendly
fire" when an artillery shell fired by their own side fell short.
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- MARINES CROSS RIVER
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- The Marines later crossed the Diyala river even though
the Iraqis had damaged the bridges to slow them up. Two 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, military
sources said.
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- Iraq said the invaders were "committing suicide"
at the capital's gates.
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- Heavy fighting raged in the afternoon and Iraqi forces
poured artillery shells into a presidential complex on the west bank of
the Tigris river that U.S. forces had seized.
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- "The Iraqis are definitely fighting back,"
said Reuters correspondent Samia Nakhoul from a central vantage point.
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- A Reuters photographer said shells, apparently American,
were landing in the gardens of the luxury Rashid Hotel and around the Information
Ministry.
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- U.S. Lieutenant Colonel 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."
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- Iraqi state-run television showed footage of Saddam,
wearing military fatigues, and his son Qusay meeting top aides. It was
not clear when the meeting took place.
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- British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon said there were
"strong indications" that Ali Hassan al-Majid, or "Chemical
Ali," Saddam's cousin and military commander in southern Iraq, was
dead. Majid earned his nickname for ordering poison gas attacks on Kurds
in the late 1980s.
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- A Reuters reporter in the capital said Iraqi Republican
Guards defended key ministries with rocket-propelled grenades.
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- U.S. military spokesman Captain Frank Thorp said he expected
to see continuing fighting with Saddam's elite troops.
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- "There's a lot of tough battles ahead," Thorp
said, adding that U.S. forces had set up checkpoints on all major roads
in and out of the capital to stop Iraqi military movements.
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- "SMOKING GUN?"
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- U.S. National Public Radio reported American forces near
Baghdad had found a cache of around 20 medium-range missiles equipped with
potent chemical warheads.
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- Attributing the report to a top official with the 1st
Marine Division, NPR said the BM-21 missiles were equipped with sarin and
mustard gas and were "ready to fire."
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- The United States and Britain launched a campaign 19
days ago to oust Saddam and rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, which
Iraq consistently denied possessing.
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- U.S. Central Command headquarters in Qatar had no immediate
comment on the NPR report.
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- In what appeared a separate incident, a U.S. officer
said biological and chemical weapons experts had found a possible storage
site for such arms south of the central town of Hindiya.
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- "Our detectors have indicated something," said
Major Ros Coffman, a public affairs officer with the U.S. 3rd Infantry.
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- "This is an initial report, but it could be a smoking
gun," Coffman told Reuters correspondent Luke Baker. "It is not
as if there is a cloud of gas hanging everywhere endangering soldiers lives.
We're talking about a facility."
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- In the south, British and U.S. troops walked unopposed
almost to the center of Basra, Iraq's southern city, for the first time,
Reuters correspondent Rosalind Russell reported.
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- Hoon said British forces had moved to the heart of Basra
and were there to stay. A British spokesman said earlier there was still
some resistance in the mainly Shi'ite Muslim city.
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- World financial markets sensed the endgame, sending stock
markets and the dollar jumping. The blue-chip Dow Jones industrial average
rose over two percent.
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- Prices of safe-haven bonds tumbled and gold lost $5 an
ounce. Oil prices hit a four-month low.
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- Some military analysts said they believed the fall of
Baghdad was imminent, others voiced caution.
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- "The battle in Baghdad and the hit-and-run strategy
we are seeing now does not mean that the Iraqi military has been completely
defeated," Frank Umbach, security and defense analyst at the German
Council on Foreign Relations, told Reuters.
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- "I see the fighting going on for a number of weeks."
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- POSTWAR ADMINISTRATION
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- Denying what was visible to many Baghdad residents as
well as television viewers around the world, Information Minister Mohammed
Saeed al-Sahaf said there had been no big U.S. raid.
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- "Baghdad is safe," he told reporters at the
Palestine hotel as a dense yellow sandstorm swept over the city, mingling
with smoke from oil fires lit to obstruct the invaders.
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- U.S. columns had been "slaughtered," Sahaf
said. "The battle is still going on. Their infidels are committing
suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad...Don't believe those liars."
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- With the war nearing a climax, the issue of how Iraq
will be run in a post-Saddam era loomed increasingly large.
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- 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.
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- Success for Blair could help placate other European leaders
who oppose the war. But U.S. officials have ruled out a key political mission
for the U.N., saying Washington and its allies earned the right to call
the shots by giving "life and blood."
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- Asked what would constitute victory, Air Marshall Brian
Burridge, one of the most senior British commanders in Iraq, said: "Personally
I'd like to see (Saddam) standing trial."
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