US forces win stronghold in Baghdad

11.00am

UPDATE - A US armored force punched into the heart of Baghdad on Monday and won a stronghold in one of President Saddam Hussein's palaces, while British paratroopers walked unopposed into the centre of Iraq's second city of Basra where residents warmly welcomed them.

The US military said the assault on central Baghdad by over 100 tanks and armored vehicles was a show of force, designed to demonstrate that troops could enter the capital at will, rather than a final attack on the city of 5 million.

Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he did not know what had happened to Saddam or where he was but asserted that he no longer ran much of Iraq and was running out of soldiers.

"There are three possibilities: He's either dead or injured or not willing to show himself," Rumsfeld told a news briefing in Washington.

Iraqi state-run television on Monday showed footage of Saddam, wearing military fatigues, and his son Qusay meeting top aides. It was not clear when the meeting took place.

As darkness fell on Baghdad, US troops remained in the presidential compound on the west bank of the Tigris river, apparently determined to stay the night and deliver a powerful message to citizens and Saddam loyalists that his time was almost done.

US troops found suspected chemical weapons in a central Iraqi town but an officer later suggested they might turn out to be pesticides rather than banned weapons.

The United States and Britain launched the war on Iraq on March 20 to oust Saddam and rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, which Iraq denied possessing.

Maj. Michael Hamlet of the US 101st Airborne Division told Reuters that initial investigations of 14 barrels found at a military training camp on Sunday revealed levels of nerve agents sarin and tabun and the blister agent lewisite.

But Gen. Benjamin Freakly, also of the 101st Airborne, said later that tests on substances at the camp and a separate agricultural site, both in the town of Albu Mahawish, could show they had a less sinister purpose.

"This could be either some kind of pesticide," Freakly told CNN. "On the other hand it could be a chemical agent -- not weaponised, a liquid agent that is in drums."

British military officials said they believed they had found the body of Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam's cousin and a member of his close entourage known as "Chemical Ali," in the rubble of a home destroyed during an air raid on the southern city of Basra on Saturday.

Majid earned his nickname for ordering poison gas attacks on Kurds in the 1980s and was Saddam's military commander in the south. "We believe that the reign of terror of Chemical Ali has come to an end," Rumsfeld said.

In Basra, about 700 British soldiers walked past the bodies of Iraqi militiamen and entered the city in the early afternoon in single-file columns.

Not a shot was fired as men, women and children came out onto the road, some to greet the new occupiers. Others begged the troops for water.

Throughout Iraq, there were reports of looting and lawlessness in areas evacuated by Saddam loyalists. On Basra's outskirts, youths carted looted furniture and appliances away in wheelbarrows and trailers.

As US Marines in tanks headed into Baghdad, looters who had grabbed the contents of a machinery warehouse headed in the opposite direction with their spoils, reported Reuters correspondent Matthew Green travelling with the Marines.

Small arms fire and explosions echoed through the southern city of Nassiriya after dark. US forces said it was in-fighting among Iraqis.

It was not known whether the fighting was linked with the reported arrival in Nassiriya of several hundred anti-Saddam Iraqi opposition fighters headed by Ahmad Chalabi, the best-known leader of the Iraqi National Congress. The fighters planned to parade through the town on Tuesday.

US chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers said Iraqi resistance was sporadic and not coherent.

"Of the 800-plus tanks they began with, all but a couple of dozen have been destroyed or abandoned," Myers said.

Preliminary reports of US dead in the attack were in the single digits. Two Marines were killed and three wounded, apparently by friendly fire, in a fierce battle for two river bridges in the east. Two more US soldiers and two journalists were killed and 15 people wounded in an Iraqi attack on a communications centre in the southern outskirts of Baghdad.

In Baghdad, hospitals battled with a constant stream of civilian dead and injured. Doctors said they were running short of anaesthetics and medical equipment.

Nine Iraqis, including a baby, were killed when two houses were flattened in a smart suburb of western Baghdad in what witnesses said was a US air raid.

At the Kadhimiya hospital in the north of Baghdad, doctors said they had taken in 18 dead and 142 injured in two days, while the Kindi hospital had four dead and 176 injured.

The fiercest fighting in Baghdad was concentrated around two bridges over the Diyala river, a tributary of the Tigris, after Iraqi defenders blew two large holes in them on Sunday.

"We had our machine guns, mortars and artillery firing. We did it the old-fashioned way," said US Col. B. P. McCoy.

A defiant Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf said the invaders were "committing suicide" at the capital's gates. But US deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz said in an interview that Sahaf had made himself "something of a joke."

"Baghdad is safe," he told reporters at the Palestine hotel. "Their infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad ... Don't believe those liars."

US Lt Col 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."

With the war apparently nearing a climax, the issue of how Iraq will be run in a post-Saddam era loomed larger.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, due to meet President Bush in Northern Ireland later on Monday, was expected to try to persuade his US ally to give the United Nations a bigger role in running Iraq after the war.

- REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq war