US leaders defend war plan as troops dig in

12.00pm

BAGHDAD - US aircraft applied relentless pressure on Iraqi positions in and around Baghdad today as US military leaders fended off growing criticism of their war plans and insisted the campaign was still on course.

Faced with much stronger than expected opposition from regular and irregular forces loyal to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, US troops dug in south of Baghdad, apparently in no rush to assault the Iraqi capital until air strikes and artillery had ground down its defenders.

Round-the-clock air strikes hammered Baghdad as the US military sought to break the elite Republican Guard units entrenched in the sprawling city's outskirts.

A huge explosion rocked an area close to the Iraqi Information Ministry this morning, a Reuters correspondent reported.

Live television pictures showed a large fire ablaze at the back of a shopping centre close to the ministry minutes after the blast jolted the city centre.

The Information Ministry was hit by at least one missile early on Saturday morning and it was not immediately clear if it had been struck again in a new raid.

With casualties mounting, three US troops were killed and a fourth was injured when a Marine helicopter crashed in southern Iraq. A US spokesman said the helicopter was not brought down by hostile fire but provided no further details. A British soldier was also killed in fighting near Basra.

As night fell on the 11th day of a war aimed at ousting Saddam, a huge fire raged close to the city centre.

It looked as though Iraqis had set alight an oil-filled trench, sending plumes of thick, black smoke billowing into the sky in a bid to hamper US and British air strikes.

In Washington, the US military said it had bombed the main training site for Iraqi Fedayeen paramilitary forces in eastern Baghdad, a presidential palace, an intelligence complex and surface-to-air missile sites.

In other developments, the US military said 10 to 15 troops were injured on Sunday when a truck drove into a group of soldiers just outside a US military base in Kuwait. The identity of the attacker was not immediately known but the incident followed a suicide attack inside Iraq on Saturday in which four US soldiers died.

British Royal Marine commandos captured an Iraqi general and killed another senior officer in clashes with Iraqi paramilitary units south of Basra on Sunday, a British military spokesman said.

But British troops have still not tried to capture the southern city of 1.5 million, where more than a week of fighting has disrupted food and electricity supplies and forced many civilians to flee the city.

President Bush, backed by Britain, launched the war to overthrow Saddam after saying he refused to give up chemical and biological weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. Iraq said it has no such weapons and none has so far been found, although invading forces have found several thousand chemical warfare suits in captured Iraqi positions.

Iraq said on Sunday its military had destroyed two US or British tanks and nine armored personnel carriers over the past 24 hours and shot down five unmanned drone reconnaissance planes. There was no immediate British or American reaction.

Officially, the United States have lost at least 39 dead and 104 injured with 17 listed as missing since the war began. Britain has lost 24 dead. There is no accurate account of Iraqi military or civilian casualties.

Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld rejected criticism that he launched the war with insufficient ground strength, but he predicted that Iraqi resistance would stiffen even more as US troops approached Baghdad.

Some US leaders and advocates of the war had predicted that many Iraqi units would not fight and that US troops would be welcomed as liberators. But such rosy scenarios have not for the most part come to pass.

Rumsfeld, facing scrutiny over his influence on a war plan that involves far fewer troops than the number used in the 1991 Gulf War, flatly denied reports that he had rejected advice from Pentagon planners for substantially more men and armour.

"That is not true," Rumsfeld said. "I think you'll find that if you ask anyone who's been involved in the process from the Central Command that every single thing they've requested has in fact happened."

Gen Richard Myers, head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the campaign was going to plan, with US and British forces already in control of 40 per cent of Iraq, but he gave a clear signal that there would be no swift ground assault on the Iraqi capital.

The aim before going in, he said, was to isolate the Iraqi leadership and cut it off from the rest of the country.

"We're not going to do anything before we're ready," Myers said. "We're certainly not going to do anything to put our young men and women in danger precipitously. We're also not going to put Iraqi civilians in danger as well. We'll be patient. We'll just continue to draw the noose tighter and tighter."

US commander General Tommy Franks, who is bringing an extra 100,000 troops to the Gulf in April, insisted there was no "operational pause" in the US and British invasion.

But US officers and soldiers in units south of Baghdad told Reuters they had orders to dig in for at least two weeks to give US air power and artillery a chance to pound Iraqi defences. Saddam has vowed to make a bloody stand and inflict huge losses on invaders in street fighting.

An Iraqi military spokesman, hailing Saturday's suicide bomb that killed four US troops, said 4,000 willing "martyrs" from across the Arab world were already in Baghdad to fight.

Radical Palestinian group Islamic Jihad said it had sent would-be suicide bombers to Baghdad to help Iraqis fight US and British troops and planned to send more.

- REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq war