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U.S., allies take two northern cities, Baghdad remains volatile
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BAGHDAD, Iraq – Two more Iraqi strongholds, the northern
oil cities of Kirkuk and Mosul, fell Thursday as U.S. and allied
forces pursued the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s army and
closed in on his ancestral hometown.
At the same time, combat and anarchy flared in Baghdad and
elsewhere, illustrating the difficulty of engineering a smooth
transition from dictatorship to democracy: A suicide bomber
seriously wounded four U.S. Marines late Thursday in the capital.
To the south, an angry crowd hacked to death two clerics at a
Shiite Muslim shrine in Najaf. To the north, looting swiftly
followed liberation in Kirkuk and Mosul.
In Kirkuk, anti-Saddam Kurdish forces swept into the city
virtually unopposed, followed by U.S. troops. In Mosul, Iraqi
forces and Baath Party officials simply slipped away –
replaced Thursday night by U.S. Special Forces.
Residents mirrored celebrations elsewhere, toppling statues of
Saddam, plundering government offices, kissing tough-skinned U.S.
Army commandos.
“It is a kind of dream,” said Ahmad Sayeed Othman,
30, of Kirkuk.
Defecting Iraqi soldiers trudged unimpeded along local roads.
They still wore their uniforms but they did not carry weapons. Some
shouted, “Hurray America and Britain!”
U.S. officers said four Iraqi army divisions, with up to 30,000
men, signaled their readiness to surrender. The northern oil fields
were almost entirely undamaged.
By early Friday, U.S. forces stood within 60 miles of
Saddam’s home city of Tikrit, where large numbers of
Republican Guard forces and other Saddam loyalists were thought to
be gathering for a last stand.
“You deserve to live as free people,” President Bush
told Iraqis in a television address broadcast by an Air Force C-130
flying over Iraq. “And I assure every citizen of Iraq, your
nation will soon be free.”
U.S. military strategists concentrated their efforts on tens of
thousands of Iraqi soldiers said to remain in the north. U.S.
warplanes repeatedly struck their units. The Iraqis’ will to
fight could not be assessed.
“They are the last significant formations on the
battlefield that we’re aware of,” said Maj. Gen.
Stanley McChrystal, vice director of operations for the
Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. “We are prepared to
be very, very wary of what they may have, and prepared for a big
fight.”
Wariness was the key word on many fronts.
One day after U.S. Marines and Army soldiers, and the euphoria
they delivered, raced through Baghdad, sporadic battles, looting
and bloodletting raged in that city and elsewhere in Iraq.
In the capital, at least one Marine was killed and dozens
wounded in fierce battles with squads of hard-core Saddam loyalists
near a palace, a mosque and other places.
Illustrating the dangers that remain, a lone man walked up to a
Marine checkpoint Thursday night and detonated an explosive
strapped to his body, seriously wounding four Marines near the
Palestine Hotel in Baghdad.
The U.S. military toll rose to at least 105 dead, with many
others wounded. Air Force Maj. Gen. Gene Renuart described the
capital as “still an ugly place.”
Officials warned that the number of casualties could grow as
U.S. warplanes and ground forces attempt to crush remaining Iraqi
troop concentrations in the north and eliminate resistance in
Baghdad and elsewhere.
“There’s still a significant amount of work to
do,” said Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem.
On the to-do list: determine if Saddam is dead, and find him if
he is alive.
The military moved its newest and most powerful conventional
bomb, a 21,500-pound monster, into the region for use against any
bunker thought to be harboring Saddam or other top Iraqi
officials.
U.S. Special Forces in Baghdad examined the site of an air
strike to determine if he was killed in Monday’s attack on a
residential neighborhood.
Patrick Peterson, Jonathan S. Landay and Martin Merzer, Knight Ridder Newspapers