Allied forces expand air attack over Iraq

Knight Ridder News Service

NEAR AN NASIRIYAH, Iraq — The air war intensified today with earth-shattering power and reports of heavy civilian casualties, U.S. forces stepped up their air attacks on Iraq's Republican Guard and the Army's 101st Airborne Division flew into position to join a coming attack on Saddam Hussein's best troops.

Civilian residents of Basra in southern Iraq fled the burning city yesterday. Hundreds attempting to flee were turned back when Iraqi paramilitary forces opened fire on them, injuring at least one, British officials and witnesses said. Associated Press

Allied warplanes and helicopters also pounded Republican Guard troops and other targets with more than 1,000 other bombing missions throughout Iraq.

"It's going to be great weather for the next week and God help our enemies," said Col. John Croley of Marietta, Ga., an air coordination officer with the U.S. Marines' combat headquarters in southern Iraq.

U.S. officials said the stepped-up air campaign was intended to soften Iraqi positions in advance of an attack — as early as this weekend — on the Republican Guard divisions that stand between Army and Marine Corps troops and Baghdad.

The Guard's Medina division, about 8,000 strong, is believed to be near the Iraqi city of Karbala. To the east, the Guard's Baghdad division, also with 8,000 fighters, is attempting to block the Marines' advance toward the capital from the vicinity of Al Kut.

The Army's 3rd Infantry Division, with about 16,000 troops, could begin its attack on the Medina Division this weekend, after 36 hours of air attacks, and no later than Monday, according to U.S. officials.

To the south, however, the zeal of Iraqi resistance fighters and the mud of northern Iraq bogged down the ground war, and early today a missile, apparently fired from Iraq, slammed into a pier near a major shopping mall in Kuwait City, Kuwaiti officials said. Two people suffered minor injures in the attack, which caused modest damage to the Souq Sharq mall.

"It was a low-level missile that apparently went under the radar," said Jasimm al Mansouri, Kuwait City's fire chief. The missile struck at 1:42 a.m., and the mall and an adjacent movie theater were nearly deserted, he said.

At least 12 other missiles have been fired at Kuwait since the war began. U.S. Patriot air defense missiles intercepted most of them.

In Baghdad, two 4,700-pound "bunker busters" — the heaviest bombs dropped since the Iraq war began 10 days earlier — crushed what U.S. officials described as communications facilities yester-day. Iraqi officials said several people were killed in that attack.

They also claimed that an air strike late yesterday killed at least 58 people and wounded scores of others when bombs or missiles devastated a market in Baghdad's Shula neighborhood. The account could not be verified.

But as battle around Baghdad began to take shape, heavy fighting still raged in the rear, notably around An Nasiriyah, a city of 500,000, where U.S. Marines and particularly stubborn Iraqi forces engaged in a fierce, daylong battle.

Four Marines were reported missing in that engagement yesterday and three other Marines were reported killed, one in combat and two in an accident.

Nearly 10,000 members of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division joined U.S. positions around An Nasiriyah. The 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, with 2,500 troops, augmented a 5,000-member Marine task force in the area.

Many more reinforcements flowed in. About 90,000 U.S. troops were in Iraq yesterday, and at least 100,000 more were on the way, according to the Pentagon.

Some good news arrived for civilians in southernmost Iraq, where the first ship carrying relief supplies worked its way through a de-mined channel and docked at Umm Qasr. The Sir Galahad, a British supply ship, carried at least 200 tons of food, water and other humanitarian aid.

Much of that was destined for Basra, a city of 1.3 million people just 40 miles away, yet unreachable. British forces still encircled the city amid reports that Iraqi fighters were continuing to fire on and otherwise intimidate Iraqi civilians.

"They are killing women and children," Faisal Abid Niser, 28, told a Knight Ridder reporter at a British outpost eight miles north of Basra. He was accompanied by his wife and two young daughters. "It was time to leave our home."

British officers said their troops fired mortars and artillery into Basra, and between 2,000 and 3,000 Basra residents dodged the fire as they escaped from Iraq's second-largest city.

In northern Iraq, the vanguard of the U.S. Army's 173rd Airborne Brigade struggled to establish a base camp in the knee-deep muck of muddy fields.

About 1,000 members of the unit parachuted into the region Wednesday night to help secure the northern flank and eventually open a new front in the war, but they were preceded by three days of rain.

"I trained in the swamps of Florida for two years and I've never seen mud like this," said Capt. Eric Blaus, 30, of Collingswood, N.J.