Marines Push North Along'Ambush Alley'

[thedrifter]

Mar 30, 6:48 AM EST

Marines Push North Along'Ambush Alley'

By ELLEN KNICKMEYER
Associated Press Writer





SOUTH-CENTRAL IRAQ (AP) -- Thousands of Marines pushed north toward Baghdad in "seek and destroy" missions Sunday, trying to open the route to the Iraqi capital and stop days of attacks along a stretch that has become known as "Ambush Alley."

Charging into previously unsecured areas, the Marines tried to provoke attacks in order to find Iraqi fighters and defeat them. A chaplain traveling with them handed out humanitarian packages to distrustful Iraqi civilians encountered along the way.

Army supply trucks appeared on the Marine route north for the first time Sunday, supporting field reports that Army and Marine forces were meeting for the first time in the ground invasion, which had the Marines trekking north along Route 80 - known as the "Highway of Death" - and Army forces punching their way across desert terrain.

Rank-and-file Marines, ordered to intercept and question each civilian they see along the route after an Iraqi army officer attacked a group of Americans in a suicide bomb attack Saturday, also handed out ration packets. For hungry Iraqis, this gift was the only thing that could convince them the Marines were not there to hurt them.

"I had one of them tell me they'd heard to be a Marine you had to eat a baby, or kill someone," one Marine about enemy prisoners of war.

Frightened Iraqis scrambled into their homes at the sight of the Americans, Marines said. One old woman clutched her mule with one hand and smacked her dogs forward with the other, trying to get them to attack the approaching American soldiers. Like many other exchanges, that encounter ended with smiles and gratitude for the rations.

Elsewhere, the U.S. Central Command, which oversees the war in Iraq, said coalition warplanes hit a series of targets in the Iraqi capital overnight into Sunday morning. In a "key strike," coalition aircraft bombed the eastern Baghdad barracks of the main training facility of the Iraqi paramilitary forces.

With advancing ground forces expecting a showdown with Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard in the final 50-mile march to Baghdad, the coalition sought to hobble Iraqi forces by striking a fuel depot in the holy Shiite city of Karbala.

"While the army is not moving forward, it is the turn of the air to shape the battle space," said Wing Commander Andy Suddards, the British pilot who led the attack. "If the tanks have no fuel, it is all going to help."

Coalition warplanes also struck surface-to-air missile batteries in eastern Baghdad, as well as the Abu Garayb presidential palace, just east of Baghdad's international airport, and two facilities at the Karada intelligence complex, on the banks of the Tigris River, Central Command said.

To the south, British commandos exchanged fire with Iraqi paramilitaries in an eastern suburb of Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, British military spokesman Group Capt. Al Lockwood said. The operation apparently aims to block off any escape route for Iraqi forces trying to leave Basra.

"They are putting up some resistance, but they are disorganized," Lockwood said of the paramilitary forces.

At least 4,000 Iraqi prisoners of war have been taken by the coalition since the conflict began, Lockwood said. On Saturday, a British tribunal released 35 civilians who had been swept up among them, he said.

British forces surrounding Basra have skirmished with paramilitaries loyal to Saddam for several days, mostly on the city's western outskirts. The Arab satellite television channel al-Jazeera, which has a correspondent in Basra, also reported a 90-minute exchange of tank and artillery fire Sunday near a bridge on the city's western edge.

Basra, Iraq's main seaport, is the heart of the country's southern oil facilities. A mostly Shiite Muslim city of about 1.3 million people, many in Basra may oppose Saddam's Sunni Muslim regime, but the city remains gripped by his ruling Baath party militia.

One Baath official warned on Arab television that fighters were competing to die in suicide attacks like the one that killed four American soldiers Saturday.

"The holy warriors are rushing to die or be martyred," Abdul-Baqi Saadoun, the No. 2 Baath official in southern Iraq, said in an interview broadcast Sunday on al-Jazeera.


Sempers,

Roger