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Battles near Iraqi cities prompt a wave of refugees
( 2003-03-28 07:59 ) (7 )

American and British troops battled Iraqi forces outside at least three key cities in south-central Iraq Thursday, and thousands of Iraqi civilians were reported to be fleeing their homes, raising concerns of a burgeoning refugee crisis.

The violent sandstorm that blinded American troops for two days began to lift and British and American warplanes flew more than 600 bombing missions.

In Baghdad, live television broadcasts showed more than a dozen explosions rocking the Iraqi capital shortly before midnight local time. A Reuters correspondent in the city reported that most of the barrage appeared to focus on the west bank of the Tigris, near key government buildings that included the Information Ministry, Planning Ministry and Foreign Ministry. There was no information on casualties.

In northern Iraq, 1,000 American paratroopers who were dropped into Kurdish-controlled territory late Wednesday secured an airfield, officials said.

South of Baghdad, fighting continued outside Nasiriyah, Najaf and Basra in what appeared to be a reflection of a new American strategy of securing the southern parts of the country before moving on to the capital.

Iraqi officials struck a defiant posture today, with the defense minister predicting a fight to the death for Baghdad.

"We will not be surprised if the enemy surrounds Baghdad in 5 or 10 days, but he will have to take the city," the defense minister, Sultan Hasim Ahmad, said. But he added, "Baghdad cannot be taken as long as the citizens in it are still alive."

Iraq said its forces had brought down an American Apache helicopter, and the government showed television images of a helicopter with United States military markings surrounded by Iraqis waving rifles.

Iraqi state television said forces of the Saddam Fedayeen militia had shot down the Apache and a pilotless drone in the mid-Euphrates region of Iraq. There were no details on the fate of the crew.

American military officials at the United States Central Command base in Qatar told reporters there that they had no reports of a missing helicopter but that a drone apparently had been lost. They suggested that the pictures of the downed Apache were of one downed earlier in the conflict.

Television images today also showed men, women and children fleeing Basra and Nasiriyah. Hundreds of refugees were reported to have poured out of Basra after food, drinking water and medical supplies ran low.

British troops distributed packets of food and water outside Az Zubair, a city not far from the Kuwaiti border. Hundreds of men thronged the trucks filled with aid in a disorderly mass outside the town.

But there were also more signs that ran counter to early expectations of military planners, who had been banking on Iraqis greeting the invading troops as liberators.

One young man, as he pushed forward to collect his food, told a British television reporter, in English, "Go back, America and Britain! Go back! Go!" He swatted the air as if bothered by an insect.

And before the trucks could be emptied, British troops were forced to leave after being fired on.

Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who went to the United States to meet with President Bush, repeated what other British, as well as American, officials have said to explain the resistance put up by some Iraqis toward coalition forces.

"Of course, there will be people fiercely loyal to that regime, who will fight all the way ?they have no option," Mr. Blair said in Washington. "I have no doubt at all that the vast majority of ordinary Iraqi people are desperate for a better and different future, for Iraq to be free."

British troops encircling Basra set up roadblocks outside the city and destroyed 14 Iraqi tanks and 4 armored personnel carriers spotted moving on the outskirts early today, officials said.

Group Captain Al Lockwood said British Army tanks of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards had engaged the tanks in a swift battle.

It was the third time since Tuesday that a number of Iraqi tanks had tried to leave Basra. The British defense secretary, Geoff Hoon, said reports of a huge column of tanks fleeing Basra on Wednesday were exaggerated, but commanders on the ground maintained that large numbers of tanks continued to maneuver.

There were also reports that British forces had taken over Basra's radio and television airwaves and were airing Arab pop songs.

Near Najaf, units of the United States Army's V Corps were attacked and engaged in a 90-minute battle with Iraqi irregular forces, Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks of the Army said at Central Command.

Some American troops were wounded, he said, but he did not confirm a report that a large number of American soldiers had been injured in a "friendly fire" incident. Commanders in the area told reporters than more than 30 soldiers had been wounded, some critically.

Inside Nasiriyah, a crucial junction on the way to Baghdad, marines were reported to have fought house-to-house battles. At the Tallil airfield, about four miles away, an American aircraft was reported to have made the first landing as part of an effort to establish a supply and transportation hub there.

Despite criticism that the initial strategy to charge toward Baghdad had left supply lines vulnerable, General Brooks said the top brass felt "pretty comfortable" about the operation to supply fuel, food and equipment to troops driving deep into Iraq.

In Baghdad, a spokesman for the Iraqi military said the United States was exaggerating its progress and its victories. The spokesman, Gen. Hazem Rawi, said that reports from American commanders that Iraq had lost some 1,000 men fighting in and around the Shiite pilgrimage center of Najaf were wrong.

"It's totally baseless," he said. "If it was true, why don't the enemies show pictures of the dead on their televisions?"

General Rawi denied that his government had lost control over the southern part of the country, a claim made by Mr. Hoon on Wednesday. The coalition controls the desert, General Rawi said, but not any major population centers.

"We hope to fight them in the cities, but American, British and Zionist media indicate and try to tell others that they have captured many cities," he said. "The enemy was not able to achieve the minimum of its objectives."

General Rawi said Republican Guard units had killed "huge numbers of the enemy" and had destroyed six armored vehicles during a fight in the southern Central Furat region.

Iraq's health minister, Omeed Medhat Mubarak, said 36 civilians were killed and 215 injured in allied air strikes on Baghdad in recent days. This included an explosion on Wednesday at a market in northern Baghdad, which Iraq attributed to an American cruise missile strike.

The American military suggested that an errant Iraqi missile might have been responsible for the marketplace explosion. General Brooks said there was an Iraqi missile battery in the vicinity and that Iraq had been using old missile stock fired with the guidance systems turned off.

"We think it is entirely possible that this may have been an Iraqi missile that went up and came down," the general said.

American and British officials continued to report what they said were dirty tactics by the Iraqi military.

"Our field commanders report that in the vicinity of An Najaf, there is one example that Iraqi regime forces are seizing children from their homes and telling their families that the males must fight for the regime or they will all face execution," General Brooks said in his briefing for reporters.

In London, Mr. Hoon said, "The contrast between the tactics of the coalition and those directed by the Iraqi regime could not be greater."

The coalition armed forces, he said, are made up of "men and women who made a free choice to serve their country." The Iraqi forces, he said, "are motivated either by fear or by hatred."