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View Full Version : We are in Baghdad, in the heart of the city



Sparrowhawk
04-05-03, 01:43 AM
This morning by 6:00 am, (7:00 pm west coast time) US military units moved into Baghdad from two different directions.

One unit is in the heart of the City.


The Republican Guard's Medina Headquarters near the city was captured... with little resisitance.


Now what?


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lurchenstein
04-05-03, 01:49 AM
Do you think the Iraqis collapsed too easily? Could they be giving up ground to pull our troops into one of their creative defenses?

greybeard
04-05-03, 01:58 AM
They haven't been too creative lately, and if these reports are true, they don't have much more real eatate to give up.


Kuwait City - US armour penetrated the "heart of Baghdad" early on Saturday encountering occasionally stiff resistance from Iraqi forces using rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and horizontally fired anti-aircraft weapons, CNN reported.

"Right now elements of the 2nd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division - that is a tank unit - are rolling in the heart of Baghdad itself. They are deep within the city limits," the US-based network's correspondent on the city's outskirts, Walter Rodgers, said in a live dispatch.

"They are encountering resistance ... stiff resistance at times," he said, citing US military sources.

The Iraqi defenders were using 20mm anti-aircraft guns in "direct fire mode" to pound US forces with shrapnel, as well as RPGs and small-arms fire, he added.

The resistance "may have slowed progress, but there is continuing progress" into the capital, he said, adding that it must have been "quite a jolt" for Baghdad residents as they woke up to see coalition forces on their doorsteps.

The incursion into Baghdad followed the announcement by US commanders that they had seized control of the capital's international airport, just 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the city centre. - Sapa-AFP

lurchenstein
04-05-03, 02:07 AM
I hope the Iraqis are only creative in talking trash.
20 mm direct fire sounds brutal.
Thanks for the update.

greybeard
04-05-03, 02:07 AM
CENCOM is now saying that both armour, infantry, and air support will be plainly visible to the public & the news media.
I can't wait to hear what the Iraqi Information Minister has to say about this. He's been spinning some real whoppers lately.

lurchenstein
04-05-03, 02:21 AM
Sometimes I hear the Iraqi reports through a local radio station driving to work. I lmao at the slant on those reports from Baghdad. Still seems eerie to me. I remember times when I caught somebody pulling some sh*t and they tried to convince me that I hadn't seen it (always p*ssed me off). The Iraqi reports (and much of the anti-war talk) reminds me of that.

wrbones
04-05-03, 02:23 AM
Greybeard, yer just jealous, 'cause you can't lie like like yerself! LOL

greybeard
04-05-03, 02:31 AM
Man, I don't know anyone that can tell that many lies at one sittin.
Evidently lyin ain't a sin in Islam.

wrbones
04-05-03, 02:57 AM
LMAO. At least not that many big ones at one sittin'! LOL

Sparrowhawk
04-05-03, 07:15 AM
Bones will teach you, Bones will say things and it'll take you weeks before you realize what he said... LOL

get you to thinking...LOL

Sgt Sostand
04-05-03, 07:36 AM
The Iraqis that dont stand down will be hurt badly

:marine:

Sparrowhawk
04-05-03, 08:45 AM
It's going to be a long, night for them, in the city


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U.S. Forces Head Into Heart of Baghdad
In the Field: Reports From The Post's Embedded Correspondents

From Baghdad: The Post's Anthony Shadid Reports

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, April 5, 2003; 8:21 AM


KUWAIT CITY, April 5 (Saturday) -- U.S. Army troops and armored vehicles entered Baghdad in large numbers this morning for the first time, military officials said, probing toward the heart of an Iraqi capital now ringed by U.S. forces.

After armored Marine columns pushed to the eastern outskirts of Baghdad on Friday and Army troops seized full control of the international airport, the U.S. forces appeared to have Baghdad and its 5 million inhabitants in a vise by day's end, with Marines in the east, Army brigades to the south and west and Special Operations forces blocking the main highway leading north.

This morning, two task forces from the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division, with at least 20 Abrams tanks and 10 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, entered the city from the south. The force moved as far north as the Tigris River, near the city center, then veered west to the airport, Air Force Maj. Gen. Victor Renuart said in a briefing at U.S. Central Command in Doha, Qatar.

"It was a clear statement of the ability of coalition forces to move at the time and place of their choosing," Renuart said.

Television news footage showed groups of civilians gathering at intersections to wave at the advancing column as destroyed Iraqi armored vehicles smoldered all around.

President Saddam Hussein's government responded to the swift advance with rhetoric as well as force, though U.S. officials described resistance to this morning's assault as sporadic and relatively light.

Iraq's information minister, Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf, said today that Baghdad was firmly under Iraqi control. He denied reports that U.S. troops had reached the city center and said Iraqi troops had defeated U.S. forces at Baghdad's airport overnight. "Everything is okay," Sahhaf said.

On Friday, state television aired a tape of Hussein on Friday exhorting Iraqis to "strike the enemy with force" and subsequently showed footage of a grinning man said to be Hussein, clad in an olive-green military uniform and black beret, walking down a Baghdad street and getting mobbed by enthusiastic supporters.

Both tapes appeared to have been filmed after the war started on March 20; the speech referred to an AH-64D Apache helicopter that went down March 24 and the street scene showed smoke from oil fires set over the past two weeks. As a result, they provided the strongest evidence to date that the Iraqi leader had survived a U.S. airstrike designed to kill him on the first night of the war as well as the relentless pounding of government buildings and palaces that has persisted ever since.

Although the worst fears of U.S. commanders failed to materialize -- Hussein's Republican Guard divisions did not mount a concerted counter-offensive or use chemical weapons -- unconventional strikes continued against U.S. troops as promised last week by Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan.

Three U.S. soldiers were killed Thursday night in a suicide attack at a checkpoint near the Haditha Dam, on the Euphrates River 130 miles northwest of Baghdad, when a pregnant woman crying in distress lured the troops toward a vehicle rigged with explosives. Journalists traveling with a Marine convoy also reported that a truck drove up to an Abrams tank traveling toward Baghdad and detonated; it was not known whether any U.S. troops were killed or injured in that incident.

U.S. officials said the three Americans killed near Haditha were Special Operations forces assigned to screen traffic on the road between Baghdad and the dam, which was captured earlier this week to prevent the Iraqi government from sabotaging the structure and flooding the Euphrates. The attack was the second suicide bombing against U.S. forces in Iraq. Four soldiers were killed last Saturday when a taxi exploded at a military checkpoint near Najaf.

In addition, the Pentagon announced this morning that eight bodies found during the rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch in the Iraqi city of Nasiriyah were those of American soldiers. And a U.S. Super Cobra attack helicopter crashed early today in central Iraq, killing two Marine pilots, the Central Command said.

As of Friday, the Pentagon had identified 58 U.S. soldiers and Marines killed in action or missing in action since the war began 16 days ago, with well more than 100 wounded. The Defense Department count, which awaits positive identification and notification of families, lags behind battlefield reports.

Michael Kelly, a columnist for The Washington Post and editor at large for The Atlantic Monthly magazine, was killed Thursday night along with a U.S. soldier when their Humvee ran off a road. Kelly became the first American journalist to die in the war.

Suicide Attacks Vowed


Sahhaf, the Iraqi information minister, threatened more suicide bombings, proclaiming that Hussein's loyalists would mount "martyrdom operations in a very new, creative way" and that Saddam International Airport -- which American commanders renamed Baghdad International Airport -- would be "the graveyard" of U.S. forces.

To protect their beachhead at the airport 10 miles from downtown Baghdad, soldiers from the Army's 3rd Infantry Division fanned out across the eight-square-mile compound to flush out Iraqi fighters from buildings, trenches and subterranean tunnels. An infantry battalion from the 101st Airborne Division headed north to the airport to assist in securing the facility and surrounding areas.

Although military officials touted the compound as being fully under U.S. control, Army Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, vice director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged that U.S. troops still were "sporadically engaging forces on airport grounds."

The airport, in flat suburbs southwest of the city, and the Marines' forward encampment, in the southeastern suburbs near a strategic intersection, provided U.S. forces with footholds from which to mount probes and raids into the heart of Baghdad aimed at testing defenses and weakening Hussein's grip on power, McChrystal said.

Sparrowhawk
04-05-03, 08:45 AM
Civilians Flee Baghdad <br />
<br />
<br />
With Baghdad's electricity and water still cut off, explosions reverberating across the city and with short-wave radio reports announcing the capture of the airport,...

gwladgarwr
04-05-03, 10:07 AM
It's been a long time since I got to post anything here, and I guess it'll be a lot longer since my unit, Delta Co., 4th LAR, is flying out this afternoon to Kuwait City. It's not going to be easy from all the news I've been hearing, but we're up and ready to go.

I hope everything will go well. Have a beer or two for me.

Semper Fidelis,

LCpl F. A. Race
Delta Co, 4th LAR
(gwladgarwr):marine:

Sparrowhawk
04-05-03, 10:26 AM
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