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| Iraq |
| U.S. Takes Battle to Baghdad Airport |
| 2003-04-04 |
| Compare this report to Robert Fisk's report in the Independent today. I think Robert is going to need his pills. Fred, is Ethel about? Meeting only light resistance, U.S. forces charged up to the outskirts of Baghdad on Thursday and fought their way into Saddam International Airport, just 10 miles from the center of the blacked-out Iraqi capital. Forward elements of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, having captured the southern side of the vast facility stretching across flat suburbs southwest of the city, battled early today with Iraqi soldiers holding out with small arms in the northern part, U.S. military officials said. Iraqi officials, desperate to hold on to the airport and its modern terminal, used loudspeakers to exhort nearby residents to join in the defense, reports from the area said, but it was not clear whether anyone heeded the call. "We've always hated the airport anyway -- all that noise, congestion, and traffic! Who needs it? The Merkins are welcome to it so long as they don't let Northwest Airlines handle the baggage." A large formation of Iraqi tanks and armed trucks tried to stage a counterattack at the airport this morning, the Reuters news agency reported, but U.S. forces repulsed them. Reuters quoted Col. John Peabody, commander of the 3rd Infantry's Engineer Brigade as saying U.S. troops "control the airport. It's a big area with a lot of buildings that need to be cleared, but it's ours." Other units from the 3rd Infantry approached Baghdad from a more southerly direction, driving up a four-lane highway and plowing through the sandy desert before stopping about 10 miles from the edge, well within sight of the bomb-scarred skyline and sprawling outer suburbs. Regiments of the 1st Marine Division, meanwhile, closed in from the southeast, rushing up a highway along the Tigris River, blasting an Iraqi tank battalion and eventually halting within 15 miles of the capital. With thousands of U.S. soldiers and armored vehicles arrayed in an arc around the city's southern rim, the 15-day-old military campaign to destroy President Saddam Hussein's three-decade-old rule shifted into a crucial and dangerous phase -- the battle for control of the capital, with its 5 million residents, Hussein's seat of government and his most loyal Baath Party defenders. U.S. commanders, whose troops have sliced through southern and central Iraq with minimal resistance and relatively few casualties, now must decide whether to lay siege to the city in hopes residents will rise up, push into the center to engage in urban warfare or try a combination of encirclement and targeted raids to whittle down Hussein's grip on power. Basra is an example of the latter. Conspicuously absent from the battlefield were significant concentrations of Republican Guard soldiers or any use of chemical or biological weapons as U.S. commanders had feared. The commanders said intense U.S. and British airstrikes had crushed two of the six Guard divisions protecting the capital and severely damaged two others, clearing the way for a relatively unobstructed push toward the capital. Although some U.S. military officials asserted that the 70,000-soldier Republican Guard was a largely broken force, other American defense officials warned that Guard units still could pose a threat to U.S. troops massing outside Baghdad. Elements of the four remaining Guard divisions have been trying to circle around the city in recent days to challenge front-line American units on the southern approaches, according to officials at Central Command regional headquarters in Doha, Qatar. Many Guard soldiers also may have retreated into Baghdad Going to be interesting. |
| Posted by:Steve White |
| #5 Steve. Either way, their F**Ked. |
| Posted by: tu3031 2003-04-04 11:18:16 |
| #4 Must have more coffee. Saddam International - Airport code: FCKD |
| Posted by: Steve 2003-04-04 10:58:12 |
| #3 Saddam International - Airport code: FCDK |
| Posted by: Steve 2003-04-04 10:56:34 |
| #2 I'd like Fiskie's next report to be on the merits of Iraqi hash vs. Afghan hash. Sounds like he knows a lot about both. Also, Iraqi citizens. Please feel free to whale the shit out of him. He wants it, he NEEDS it. It's how he assuages his Anglo-Saxon guilt. It's his therapy. And it makes for an easy story. And Fiskie. Next stop Damascus. Book a room. |
| Posted by: tu3031 2003-04-04 08:21:08 |
| #1 Flit makes the point that the airport is a lovely place from which to interdict Iraqi troops trying to retreat back into the city. Those attacks on the airport are likely to be Iraqi troops desperately trying to shot their way out of the cordon around them. |
| Posted by: Hiryu 2003-04-04 06:09:11 |