The Hindu : Skirmishes at Baghdad palace, mosque

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Apr 11, 2003

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Skirmishes at Baghdad palace, mosque

A U.S. Army man entertains children outside the former Baath Party headquarters in Ad Dayr near Basra on Thursday. — AFP

BAGHDAD April 10.

U.S. forces battled holdout fighters here today as rampant looting persisted in the capital. To the north, Kurdish fighters reported a major gain, entering the city of Kirkuk near some of Iraq's most productive oil fields.

A day after U.S. officials declared that Saddam Hussein's regime no longer controlled Baghdad, the U.S. Central Command said American marines engaged in ``intense fighting'' with pro-Saddam forces at the Imam Mosque, the Az Amihyah Palace and the house of a leader of the Baath party.

Capt. Frank Thorp, a spokesman at the Central Command in Doha, Qatar, said U.S. troops acted on information that regime leaders were trying to organise a meeting in the area. During the operations, he said, Marines were fired on from the mosque compound.

He said he didn't know whether Saddam was among those trying to organise the meeting or whether any regime leaders were captured or killed.

An Iraqi with the currency notes which he looted from a bank in Baghdad on Thursday. — AP

That engagement aside, the largely one-sided battle for Baghdad appeared nearly over, and U.S. commanders were focussing on plans to oust pro-Saddam forces from remaining strongholds — including Saddam's heavily-defended hometown of Tikrit and the northern city of Mosul.

U.S. military officials said in Qatar that navy bomber and special forces teams were targeting Tikrit, 160 km north of here, to ensure it does not become a new command centre for the regime as Iraqi soldiers are pushed into the area both from the capital and the north.

The U.S. President, George W. Bush, and the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, sought to calm fears that the coalition troops would become an `occupying force'. `` We will help you build a peaceful and representative Government that protects the rights of all citizens. And then our military forces will leave'', Mr. Bush said in a video message, broadcast on Thursday in Iraq.

Mr. Blair said : ``Our forces are friends and liberators of the Iraqi people, not your conquerors.'' However, power outages and collapse of Baghdad's television channels meant that Iraqis did not see the messages.

In northern Iraq, a convoy of Kurdish fighters drove into an industrial neighbourhood of Kirkuk. It was unclear whether Iraqi forces were still in Kirkuk. Shooting initially erupted on the city's northwest edge, but then Kurdish forces were able to drive around at will.

U.S. military officials stressed that the Kurdish fighters were acting in coordination with American special operations troops, an apparent attempt to reassure Turkey that the Kurds would not run the northern oil centre — which the Turks would see as a signal of their worst fear, creation of an independent Kurdish state.

Turkey's Foreign Minister, Abdullah Gul, today said that Turkey would send military observers to Kirkuk — at the invitation of the U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell — to make sure Iraqi Kurdish fighters withdraw from the city.

There was no sign of damage to the northern oil wells, which U.S. officials had said were rigged with explosives. Kurdish forces also took control of the oil-producing city of Khaneqin, 145 km north of here and near the Iranian border.

In Baghdad, thousands of people from poor outlying districts surged into the city centre with wheelbarrows and pushcarts for a second day of looting, setting fires to some Interior Ministry buildings and making off with anything they could carry.

Looted buildings included the German embassy and the French Cultural Centre.

``There's civilian looting like crazy, all over the place,'' said U.S. Lance Corporal Darren Pickard, adding there weren't enough American soldiers to carry out orders to stop the vandalism.

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