Troops locked in fierce battles with Republican Guards

Tonight huge explosions rocked the heart of Baghdad, sending clouds of smoke skywards around the presidential Old Palace compound near the Tigris River.

Earlier in the day warplanes and cruise missiles pounded the same compound, targeting a palace used by Saddam’s younger son Qusay.

Coalition bombers – including long range B-1s, B-52s and B-2 “stealth” aircraft working together for the first time – pounded a string of targets in the city.

The series of engagements fought by US troops with the Republican Guard were their first sustained contacts with the Iraqi dictator’s best troops as they sought to prepare the ground for the final assault on Baghdad.

The US Defence Department said allied air strikes had caused ”a very significant weakening” of Iraqi forces, and Iraqi commanders were moving Guard troops around to shore up their strength.

Major General Stanley McChrystal said 3,000 precision-guided bombs were dropped on Iraqi forces over the weekend, more than a third of the total number dropped since the war began.

The bombings had caused “a very significant weakening of the forces”, he said.

“We are seeing some movement of Republican Guard formations as well. ... What we think we’re seeing them do is moving to reinforce other units that have been severely degraded.”

A week of heavy bombing has left some of the Guard units surrounding Baghdad at less than half strength, with the Medina and Baghdad divisions the most severely affected, Pentagon officials said.

US military sources described the contacts with the Guards’ Medina Division, protecting the southern approaches to Baghdad, as “skirmishing” ahead of the main battle.

“We are targeting them, we are destroying a number of them, we are taking away their ability to fight,” the coalition deputy director of operations, Brigadier General Vince Brooks, told reporters at Central Command, Qatar.

American patrols were said to be probing the defences of the capital, some crossing the “red line” supposedly drawn around the city by Saddam, marking the point he will use chemical weapons if the coalition forces advance beyond it.

Some of the fiercest fighting took place at the town of Hindiyah – 50 miles south of Baghdad – where US troops from the 3rd Infantry Division reportedly killed at least 35 Iraqi soldiers in a dawn assault.

Several dozen Republican Guards were also reportedly taken prisoner in the operation.

British Paras were involved in a ferocious firefight with two Iraqi infantry companies in the Rumaila oilfields to the north of Basra in an engagement which left 200 Iraqi dead and wounded.

The Paras called in close air support from RAF Harriers and US A10 “tankbusters” during the clash which began late on Sunday afternoon and continued into the early hours of today.

Tonight, US troops killed seven women and children at a checkpoint in southern Iraq when their van would not stop as ordered, a military official said.

Two other civilians were wounded in the incident at an army checkpoint on a road near Najaf, the scene of heavy fighting, the official said.

Meanwhile, US marines and special forces were hunting one of Saddam’s most notorious henchmen, Ali Hassan al-Majid – dubbed “Chemical Ali” after he gassed the Iraqi Kurds at Halabja in 1988.

US marines raided Shatra, near Nasiriyah, in the centre of the country, after intelligence reports that al-Majid was there, together with other senior Baath Party officials. However, US forces arrived too late.

In London, Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon ruled out any “substantial increase” in the 45,000-strong British force already committed to the conflict.

In Washington, Pentagon spokeswoman Tori Clarke said US officials had seen evidence that members of Saddam’s family, and the families of senior Iraqi officials, had tried to flee the country.

When pressed for details she would not elaborate.

“We have seen some reports recently, and I’ll leave it at that,” she said.