- BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Heavy
fighting raged in southern Iraq on Wednesday, U.S. paratroopers took control
of a key airfield in the north and at least 15 Iraqi civilians were killed
in a Baghdad street during another intense bombardment.
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- The United States denied that it had intentionally targeted
the Shaab residential district of Baghdad, where Iraqi witnesses spoke
of a twin American missile strike, but the Pentagon left open the possibility
that a missile or bomb had gone astray.
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- Reuters correspondents counted 15 scorched corpses lying
amid blackened, mangled cars and rubble from broken buildings in the Shaab
area of Baghdad. Flames poured from an oil truck. Yelling residents pulled
a man with a bloody head from rubble and said a pregnant woman was among
the dead.
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- On a day in which confused reports emerged of heavy fighting
around the southern city of Basra as well as closer to Baghdad, President
Bush said the United States wanted to protect Iraqi civilians. But he warned
President Saddam Hussein that his day of reckoning was near.
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- About 1,000 soldiers of the U.S. Army's 173rd Airborne
Brigade, based in Italy, parachuted into a key airfield in a Kurdish region
of northern Iraq, becoming the first sizable American military presence
in that part of the country, defense officials said.
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- The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said
there was no Iraqi resistance. U.S. troops could use the airfield to drop
armor and reinforcements to open a new front in the war.
-
- In southern Iraq, a British official said a column of
Iraqi tanks and armored personnel carriers poured out of Basra, where civilian
unrest was reported on Tuesday. As it headed south, it was attacked by
U.S. and British air and artillery forces.
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- SANDSTORMS CONTINUE
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- The destruction in the Baghdad shopping district caused
the first known substantial civilian casualties in a week of unrelenting
air attacks on targets in and around the city.
-
- Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, vice director for operations
for the U.S. Joint Staff, said the U.S. military did not target anything
in the Shaab district and he did not know if it was hit by an errant U.S.
missile or an Iraqi anti-aircraft missile falling back to earth.
-
- Another U.S. defense official, speaking on condition
of anonymity, said: "Is there a potential for an errant missile to
go astray like a Tomahawk or something like that? Yes."
-
- South of Baghdad, the area around the Shi'ite Muslim
shrine city of Najaf emerged as a key battleground. In one Iraqi attack,
a U.S. military officer said an unspecified number of U.S. tanks and Bradley
fighting vehicles had been destroyed but said he believed their crews had
escaped from the vehicles.
-
- U.S. forces advancing toward Baghdad fought a fierce
battle with Iraqi forces for control of a bridge over the Euphrates river
close to Najaf.
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- CNN said a large armored column of elite Republican Guard
units streamed out of Baghdad heading toward U.S. forces near Najaf, who
were braced for a battle.
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- BUSH: "DAY OF RECKONING"
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- Bush told hundreds of troops and their families in Florida
that U.S. fighting units were now facing desperate troops loyal to President
Saddam Hussein.
-
- "We cannot predict the final day of the Iraqi regime,
but I can assure you, and I assure the long-suffering people of Iraq, there
will be a day of reckoning for the Iraqi regime, and that day is drawing
near," Bush said, speaking at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, which
houses U.S. Central Command.
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- "Our pilots and cruise missiles have struck vital
military targets with lethal precision," he said.
-
- In contrast, he said Iraqi units "wage attacks while
posing as civilians. They use real civilians as human shields. They pretend
to surrender, then fire upon those who show them mercy," Bush said.
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- Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf said
more than 500 people had been wounded and 200 homes destroyed as U.S. forces
stormed through Nassiriya city earlier.
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- A U.S. military official said some of the 12 soldiers
whose supply convoy was ambushed near Nassiriya in southern Iraq on Sunday
may have been killed by their captors although they tried to surrender.
-
- The Pentagon said it was flying its high-tech 4th Infantry
Division and other units totaling more than 30,000 troops to the Gulf to
join the invasion of Iraq. Some commentators have said U.S. ground troops
were overstretched, especially since Iraqi resistance has been more troublesome
than expected.
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- Bush launched the war with British support to depose
Saddam and take control of his alleged weapons of mass destruction. Iraq
denied having any such weapons and U.S. forces have not yet found any.
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- Britain's defense minister Geoff Hoon accused Saddam
loyalists of firing at their own civilians to prevent them from rising
up against the government.
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- An Arab television channel broadcast video of two dead
soldiers and two prisoners of war, all said to be British.
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- Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, his main
ally on Iraq, were to meet at the Camp David presidential retreat later
on Wednesday to discuss political and humanitarian aspects of the conflict.
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- The United Nations World Food Program said Iraq would
probably need the biggest humanitarian operation in history to feed its
entire population after the U.S.-led invasion.
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