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thedrifter
03-28-03, 06:21 AM
March 27, 2003

After ‘another day in the infantry,’ troops move within 50 miles of Baghdad


Times staff


DOHA, QATAR (March 27, 2003) — American and British forces fought pockets of Iraqi troops in scattered actions over the entire 200 miles from the Persian Gulf to 50 miles outside of Baghdad today.
Coalition officers say the unexpectedly widespread resistance is coming in many cases from soldiers forced at gunpoint by Saddam Hussein loyalists to take on the overwhelming superior firepower of the coalition. They even assert that Saddam loyalists threaten to kill families of soldiers who refuse to fight.

That, a British officer explained, is why 14 Iraqi tanks broke out from Basra at daybreak Thursday in the face of almost certain destruction. In fact, the British said, all of the aging Russian-made T-55s tanks were destroyed while British forces suffered no losses.

It was the second day in a row that British forces destroyed enemy tanks around Iraq’s second largest city. On Tuesday night, in a pair of actions, the British say their troops destroyed 19 T-55 tanks.

Further north, the American 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized) and the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force fought a series of actions against what the command called irregulars. The coalition march toward Baghdad had been slowed by two days of vicious sandstorms.

On Thursday, soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) continued streaming into southern Iraq, some making a grueling, 19-hour road trip to reach newly established supply bases in Southern Iraq with names like Exxon and Shell.

The elite troops were assigned the job of protecting the ever-lengthening American supply lines, which have proved to be especially vulnerable to attack by relatively small bands of Iraqi troops.

The troops rode lightly armored vehicles. Their rucksacks were strapped to the outside, but the cramped compartment offered little comfort to soldiers trying sleep between security shifts.

“Just another day in the infantry,” said Pvt. Shaun Redlinger, 20, of Gastonia, N.C., who would have much rather ridden in on helicopters. “I thought we’d air-assault in.”

East of An Najaf, 3rd Infantry Division troops were “attacked by vehicle-mounted irregulars where there had been a report of significant number of vehicles approaching. The reports were not accurate in terms of the size of the force and [the] units soundly defeated the attack, destroying most of the force,” said the American deputy director of operations, Brig. Gen. Vince Brooks.

During the day Thursday, action was light in the area, giving troops a chance to regroup and rest.

It was in that area that “repressive acts against Iraqi citizens showing any signs of tolerance of the coalition are growing harsher,” Brooks said. “Our field commanders report that in the vicinity of An Najaf, as one example, Iraqi regime forces are seizing children from their homes, telling their families that the males must fight for the regime or they will all face execution.”

British officials said fighting among Iraqis inside Basra may well have been between Saddam loyalists and troops who were refusing to fight the American and British forces.

Also on Thursday, Marines between An Nasiriyah and Al Kut fought a series of sharp skirmishes, including one where light armored vehicles from the Marines poured heavy machine gun fire in an Iraqi army barracks for more than hour. Cobra guns also joined the fight.

The Marines are approaching Al Kut, a city that sits on the Tigris River and one of the main roads to Baghdad.

British troops remember Al Kut well. It is the site of one of their most humiliating defeats. In 1915, a British force trying to move from Basra to capture Baghdad had to retreat into Al Kut, where the Iraqis laid siege to them. Eventually the British surrendered. In all, during its three years in Iraq, the British suffered nearly 52,000 deaths.

Coalition officials also said Thursday that an explosion in a crowded Baghdad market place Wednesday was probably caused by an errant Iraqi anti-aircraft missile, not a misguided coalition bomb. Iraqi officials blame the attack, which it said killed 14 civilians, on American or British bombs.

“Although investigations continue into this tragic incident, it could clearly have been caused by fallout from the regime’s anti-aircraft fire or the failure of one of the regime’s own missiles,” British Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon said Thursday.

Brooks, the deputy director of operations for the Americans, said, “I think we won’t have a final answer until we’re in Baghdad ourselves, which we will be. The best we can do at this point is account for everything we did and we have accounted for our weapons systems that we fired that night, they hit their targets we’re certain of that. And the rest of the story we just don’t know, we may never know.”

And for the second time in recent days, coalition officials announced the discovery inside Iraqi positions of equipment designed to protect troops from chemical attacks.

Adm. Michael Boyce, chief of the British military staff, said soldiers of the Royal Irish Regiment recently captured an Iraqi command post in the Rumaila oil fields in southern Iraq.

“There were numerous chemical weapons protection suits and respirators left behind and this kit was effective, well cared for and in good working order,” Boyce said. “We have to ask ourselves why Iraqi commanders felt that infantry in this part of Iraq should be issued weapons of mass destruction equipment and protection.”

Wednesday, American Marines found thousands of similar protective suits in a hospital in An Nasiriyah.


Staff writers Matthew Cox with the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), C. Mark Brinkley with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, and Robert Hodierne in Doha, Qatar contributed to this report


Sempers,

Roger