Republican Guards under attack
Helicopters have begun attacking Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard forces arrayed around Baghdad, a Pentagon official said tonight.
Asked about ground forces, Major General Stanley McChrystal said, “We have not gotten into direct firefights with Republican Guard forces.”
As bombs began falling around Baghdad tonight, it was reported that Allied planes were due to fly more than 1,000 sorties today – 800 of them in the Baghdad area where elite the Republican Guard was to be targeted.
The US Army’s Third Infantry division moved to within 50 miles of the Iraqi capital and was confronting the Republican Guard’s Medina Division, said the be the best equipped of all Saddam Hussein’s forces.
He said that so far in the war, 2,000 precision-guided weapons have been used against the Iraqis.
“All of the pieces are falling into place,” McChrystal told a Pentagon briefing tonight.
He expressed regret about a US bomb that hit a passenger bus carrying Syrian civilians fleeing the war. Five were killed and 10 wounded in the incident, according to Syria’s official news agency.
The general said the bomb was aimed at a bridge in Iraq, 100 miles from the Syrian border. “A bus came into the pilot’s view too late to recall the bomb aimed at the bridge,” he said.
“Unintended casualties like this are regrettable,” said McChrystal, vice chief of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Asked about the relative slow pace of Iraqi surrendering, McChrystal suggested that members of the Fedayeen, Saddam Hussein’s most trusted militia, had infiltrated regular Iraqi army units, telling them to “fight or be shot in the back.”
McChrystal suggested that all phases of the US-British military operation were on track.
“We are on the timeline, if not slightly ahead of the schedule that General Franks has set,” he said.
“Thetempo of the operation is controlled by General Franks. Operations will occur at the time and place of his choosing,” McChrystal said.
American forces chased down leads from captured Iraqis and from documents on possible chemical and biological weapons sites, but could not confirm the presence of any weapons of mass destruction.
Asked if US forces had found evidence of such weapons, McChrystal said, “We have not.”
A suspicious plant captured by American troops was still being evaluated, other officials said.
Earlier, at Central Command headquarters in Qatar, Franks said, “It would not surprise me if there were chemicals in the plant and it would not surprise me if there weren’t.”
Franks said some sites suspected of containing weapons of mass destruction are in American control but others are not. “It’s a bit early for us to have an expectation of having found” these weapons, he said.
US officials are questioning two captured Iraqi generals about chemical and biological weapons, an American commander in the region said. The military also is following up on a cache of documents found by commandos in western Iraq, the Pentagon’s top general said.
US Central Command, which oversees the war in Iraq, said in a statement that troops were examining several “sites of interest,” but that it was premature to call the plant in Najaf a chemical weapons factory.
Finding deadly chemical or biological weapons would be a coup for the United States, which says its invasion of Iraq is meant to rid Iraq of such weapons.
Iraq claims it destroyed all of its chemical and biological weapons and ended its nuclear weapons programme shortly after the 1991 Gulf War. UN weapons inspectors say those claims are highly suspect – and the United States says they are blatant lies.
