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Suicide taxi driver kills soldiers { March 29 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46001-2003Mar29.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46001-2003Mar29.html
Suicide Bombing Kills U.S. Troops
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, March 29, 2003; 9:04 AM
KUWAIT CITY, March 29 (Saturday) -- A suicide bomber driving a taxi filled with explosives killed four U.S. soldiers today at a highway checkpoint in central Iraq, military spokesmen said, the first such attack on American troops in war in which Iraqi forces have been accused of dressing as civilians and employing so-called human shields.
The incident occurred near the city of Najaf, about 80 miles south of Baghdad, according to spokesmen quoted by news services. Capt. Andrew Wallace told the Associated Press that members of the 1st Brigade of the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division were manning a checkpoint north of the city when a taxi stopped nearby and its driver waved for help. When five U.S. soldiers approached the car, it exploded, Wallace said.
It was the first successful suicide bombing reported by U.S. forces during the 10-day-old war. An earlier suicide attack on a military convoy failed when a vehicle laden with explosives rammed a fuel truck in central Iraq but failed to explode. Four civilians, including an Australian journalist, were killed by a car bomb last Saturday in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.
The attack underscored the dangers facing U.S. Army and Marine units as they continued to fight pitched battles with Iraqi soldiers and paramilitary forces across southern Iraq, where pockets of resistance threaten the long supply lines of the American troops massing south of Baghdad.
In the Iraqi capital, which was pounded by more cruise missiles and two massive "bunker buster" bombs, a crowded market was devastated Friday by a powerful explosion that the government said killed 58 people. Iraqi officials said the market was gutted by one of the U.S. missiles as residents of the beleaguered city milled through the stalls on the evening of the Muslim Sabbath. The U.S. pummeling also hit sites near the Information Ministry and Planning Ministry along with an office of President Saddam Hussein's Baath Party.
U.S. officials at Central Command regional headquarters in Doha, Qatar, said they are investigating the market blast but offered no explanation. In any case, news of the killings, quickly broadcast on Arabic-language television networks, seemed likely to further complicate the Bush administration's efforts to convince Iraqis and other Arabs that the nine-day-old assault on Hussein's government is intended to remove a threat to peace and improve their lives.
Syria, a neighbor of Iraq that has strongly opposed the conflict, was accused in Washington by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld of providing night-vision goggles and other military equipment to Hussein's embattled government. "We consider such trafficking as hostile acts and will hold the Syrian government accountable," he said.
The Syrian Foreign Ministry in Damascus called the accusation unfounded and described it as a way to cover up U.S. crimes against Iraqi civilians.
Here in Kuwait City, a thunderous explosion damaged a posh shopping center on the Persian Gulf shore early this morning. Officials said the blast came after a missile, apparently fired from Iraq, crashed into the sea wall. The missile did not carry chemical or biological agents, and no injuries were immediately reported, Kuwaiti officials said.
Farther north along the Kuwaiti shore, a U.S. Marine unit landed Friday in the first of a wave of reinforcements due to arrive in the region as U.S. military commanders focused on hunting down the paramilitary groups in southern and central Iraq. The 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, comprising more than 2,000 Marines from Camp Lejeune, N.C., will travel to Iraq to bolster forces guarding the supply columns bringing food, fuel, ammunition and other depleted goods to Army and Marine units massing on the southern approaches to Baghdad. .
In the day's most intense fighting, Marines exchanged tank and artillery fire with Iraqi soldiers and militiamen in and around Nasiriyah, a city of about 500,000 people on the Euphrates River and about a third of the distance between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad. U.S. defense officials said four Marines were missing after the battle, in addition to eight others who have not been seen since a gun battle in the area Sunday.
In all, Pentagon officials said, 37 U.S. soldiers and Marines have been killed or gone missing in action, with about 100 wounded. The toll, however, has often lagged behind the fighting since the war began March 20.
Nasiriyah, with its two bridges over the Euphrates, is a vital link in the U.S. supply chain, particularly for a Marine column moving toward Baghdad east of the river. Although Marines seized the bridges last weekend, U.S. supply convoys have been subjected to regular attacks from a paramilitary group called Saddam's Fedayeen, leading some Marines to dub the southern entrances to the city "Ambush Alley."
U.S. commanders said they intend to concentrate on smashing Fedayeen units in the days ahead. Several officers privately called the effort a "pacification" program, echoing Vietnam War efforts to target Communist guerrillas that had infiltrated villages.
"We're going to continue the attack throughout our area of operations with increased focus on these regime death squads," said Lt. Col. George Smith, a top war planner for the Marines, using the new Pentagon-crafted term for the Fedayeen. "We're going to find 'em. We're going to hunt 'em down. We're going to kill 'em."
As the first step in that effort, Marines have attempted to gain control over areas of the city beyond the bridges and principal roadways. Over the past few days, Marines have engaged in sometimes fierce street fighting with militiamen clad in civilian clothes. Some military officials said the militiamen have been using civilians as shields.
Lt. Col. David Pere, senior watch officer at the Marine headquarters in southern Iraq, said the Marines swept through a series of row houses on Thursday that had been used by snipers to fire on U.S. forces. Military officials also said U.S. Special Operations aircraft carried out raids in Nasiriyah on Thursday aimed at destroying a pair of buildings used by paramilitary forces.
Nevertheless, a convoy of about 200 Marine trucks and other vehicles traveling north out of Nasiriyah came under fire from mortars and rocket-propelled grenades on Friday. Commanders dispatched AH-1 Cobra attack helicopters, and teams of Marines from both north and south to rescue the convoy, which reported no U.S. casualties.
Although field commanders and journalists with units in Nasiriyah have reported on some of the battles in the city, the Pentagon and the U.S. Central Command have not provided details about the fighting, including casualty figures, at news briefings.
Closer to Baghdad, most front-line Army and Marine units continued to hold their positions to allow supply lines and reinforcements to catch up. While the Army's 3rd Infantry Division consolidated about 50 miles south of Baghdad, near the city of Karbala, the Marines were concentrating their forces farther east on a road leading to Kut, a major city 100 miles southeast of Baghdad.
The pause in forward movement allowed commanders to direct air power at the Iraqi defensive units ahead of them and attack militia units along the supply routes that stretch into central Iraq from the Kuwaiti border. In the first intense combat mission for the 101st Airborne Division, more than three dozen AH-64 Apache attack helicopters struck targets around the city of Karbala on Friday night, along with Navy, Marine, Air Force and British aircraft. U.S. officials believe elements of the Medina Division of Iraq's elite Republican Guard have moved toward Karbala in recent days along with more paramilitary fighters.
A variety of Iraqi military vehicles , including four tanks, reportedly were destroyed, and two of the Apaches were damaged while landing at their base in central Iraq.
In the airstrikes on targets in and around Baghdad, U.S. warplanes and cruise missiles pounded communications facilities, government buildings and troop positions ringing the capital. Bone-jarring explosions rocked Baghdad and a towering cloud of orange smoke rose over the skyline after a break in intense sandstorms allowed pilots to resume bombing runs.
In addition to the telecommunications facilities, the Baath Party office and sites near the information and planning ministries, four telephone-company exchanges were gutted, disrupting phone service in the city.
In an attack that sent shock waves across the capital, a B-2 stealth bomber dropped two 4,700-pound, satellite-guided "bunker buster" bombs on a major communications tower on the banks of the Tigris River. After nightfall, thundering explosions were seen near the Republican Presidential Palace complex. And early this morning, the upper floors of the Information Ministry also were struck by a bomb or missile, sending small fireballs hurtling toward the street and leaving parts of the structure ablaze.
Iraq's information minister, Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf, said more than 4,000 Iraqis have been killed or wounded in bombings since the war began, many of them inside government buildings. "There are people in them," he said. "There are civil servants, and they are people, civilians, who enter these buildings."
The explosion at the market occurred in Baghdad's Shuala district, a working-class Shiite Muslim neighborhood on the city's northern outskirts. Some residents said they heard a plane overhead before the explosion, and one said he saw the glow of engines. When the bomb landed, they said, they heard no explosion and saw no fire before the mortal shrapnel spewed out.
Sahhaf called the incident a war crime and accused the United States of "cowardly attacks that hit civilian neighborhoods."
A similar explosion Wednesday devastated another neighborhood on Baghdad's outskirts, killing at least 14 people; U.S. officials suggested an errant Iraqi surface-to-air missile was responsible. The crater at the Shuala market was about four feet across and two feet deep, smaller than the gaping holes likely to be left by a cruise missile.
The missile that hit Kuwait early this morning appeared to have been the 12th Iraqi missile to have been fired at the country since the war began, but the first to have caused any significant damage. Eight Iraqi missiles have been intercepted by Patriot antimissile batteries, two have fallen into the desert and another into the Persian Gulf.
In southeastern Iraq, British forces were on the outskirts of Basra, but they continued to avoid heading into the city of 1.3 million for fear of becoming entrapped in a bloody urban battle.
British military officials said Iraqi paramilitary forces fired mortars and machine guns on a group of civilians trying to leave Basra, forcing them to return to the city. Lt. Cmdr. Emma Thomas, a British military spokeswoman, said an initial group of several hundred made it out safely, and were given food and medical attention. She said the firing started when a second group of about the same size started fleeing. It was not immediately known how many were killed or injured.
Intense fighting broke out in and around Basra overnight. After receiving a report of hundreds of Baath Party militiamen gathering in a building in the center of the city, British commanders called in a U.S. airstrike. A delayed-fuse missile was fired into the building, and British Maj. Fraser Smith said about 75 percent of the building collapsed.
British troops also staged two overnight raids on the outskirts of Basra, targeting buildings that they had heard were being used by paramilitary units to organize attacks. Four Iraqis were reported killed with no British casualties. A British soldier died in a friendly fire incident northwest of Basra when the U.S. pilot of an A-10 Thunderbolt II attack plane fired on a light armored reconnaissance vehicle. Two British soldiers were also injured. It was the third deadly friendly fire incident involving the British so far in the war.
British troops in the area seized a water treatment plant on the west bank of the Shatt al-Arab waterway outside Basra in an effort to restore service for the city and reported finding a large number of rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and other weapons. With the nearby port city of Umm Qasr cleared of Iraqi mines, the British ship Sir Galahad docked with several hundred thousand pounds of water, rice, lentils, chickpeas and other food supplies.
Gen. Michael Jackson, the British chief of general staff, rejected reports that coalition forces had become "bogged down" by weather and greater-than-expected resistance from Iraq.
"Armies cannot move forever without stopping from time to time, to regroup, to ensure that their supplies are up, and even, believe it or not, soldiers need a bit of sleep from time to time," Jackson said at a briefing in London. "So this 'bogged down' is a tendentious phrase. It's a pause whilst people get themselves sorted out for what comes next."
Baker reported from Marine combat headquarters in southern Iraq. Correspondents Anthony Shadid in Baghdad, Rick Atkinson with U.S. forces in Iraq, Susan B. Glasser in Kuwait City, Keith B. Richburg outside Basra, Peter Finn in Basra and Alan Sipress in Doha, Qatar, and staff writer Jonathan Weisman in Washington contributed to this report.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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