- SOUTHERN IRAQ (Reuters) -
U.S. troops on Tuesday reported killing hundreds of Iraqi soldiers south
of Baghdad without losing a man, as signs emerged of a possible uprising
against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in the southern city of Basra.
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- In what appeared to be the biggest ground engagement
since the war began last Thursday, a U.S. military official said 150 to
300 Iraqi forces were believed killed when they attacked the U.S. Seventh
Cavalry near the town of Najaf, about 100 miles south of Baghdad.
-
- "Apparently ground forces tried to hit some of our
guys with rocket propelled grenades," the official said.
-
- "They did damage a couple of pieces of our gear
but we've had no reports of casualties on our side. But apparently there
are some reports that we may have killed quite a few of them," he
said.
-
- "Estimates differ. Some say 200-300. Some say 150,"
the official said.
-
- On day six of the war launched by President Bush to depose
Saddam and take control of his alleged weapons of mass destruction, planes
again hammered positions of the elite Republican Guard defending Baghdad.
-
- Meanwhile, British chief of staff Major General Peter
Wall said there were indications that a revolt might be underway in Basra,
Iraq's second biggest city.
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- 'KEEN TO CAPITALIZE'
-
- "We will be very keen to capitalize on it. We have
a duty to reinforce that but we've got to make sure we do that in a sensible
way and don't do anything hotheaded that we might come to regret,"
he told reporters at Central Command, battle headquarters for U.S.-led
forces, in Qatar.
-
- Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf denied
reports of an uprising, which first came from British television reporters
near the city.
-
- To the south of Baghdad, U.S. armored columns were slowed
by blinding sandstorms. Reuters correspondents with U.S. columns advancing
on Baghdad said choking dust storms cut visibility to five yards in some
places.
-
- The Shi'ite people of Basra rose up against Saddam's
Sunni-dominated government after the 1991 Gulf War, but their revolt was
rapidly smashed as U.S. forces stood aside.
-
- U.S.-led forces had been hoping the Shi'ite south would
welcome their invasion this time round.
-
- Richard Gaisford, a television journalist with Britain's
ITN reporting from just outside Basra, said British forces had bombed the
ruling Baath Party offices in the city.
-
- "They have completely destroyed the Baath party
headquarters," Gaisford told Sky News. "They've dropped a 2,000
pound bomb on the building... It's totally destroyed it."
-
- Earlier, Colonel Chris Vernon, a British military spokesman
in Kuwait, told a news conference that British forces arrayed around Basra
had attacked precise Iraqi targets during the day and had captured a top
official of Saddam's Baath party there.
-
- British forces south of Basra blocked an attempted breakout
by up to 50 Iraqi tanks seeking to press southward from the edge of the
city, a British naval commander said.
-
- Two British soldiers were killed by "friendly fire"
near the city on Monday and two others were seriously injured, when their
tank was mistakenly attacked by another British tank.
-
- With the humanitarian situation in Basra causing mounting
concern, British naval officers said they had finally secured Iraq's only
deep-water port of Umm Qasr. A British navy ship was expected to dock by
Thursday, bringing the first seaborne aid for thousands of hungry civilians
in southern Iraq.
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- IRAQI BODIES
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- As one Marine convoy pushed north, it passed the corpses
of at least 30 Iraqis, apparently killed in an air strike that hit buses,
trucks and cars.
-
- All the dead were men, some of them wearing the black
clothes of Iraqi irregular forces. Other men, many of them wounded, were
taken prisoner by U.S. Marines.
-
- Saddam urged Iraqi tribesmen to join the battle against
U.S. and British forces, without waiting for further orders.
-
- "The enemy has violated your lands and now they
are violating your tribes and families," the Iraqi leader said in
a statement read on his behalf on state television.
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- The United States said Marines seized more than 200 weapons,
stockpiles of ammunition and over 3,000 chemical suits with masks at an
Iraqi hospital which was being used as a "military staging area."
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- Central Command in Qatar said in a statement that Marines
operating in the southern city of Nassiriya captured about 170 Iraqi soldiers
at the hospital. They were not armed.
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