- BAGHDAD (Reuters) - At least
15 scorched corpses littered a Baghdad street on Wednesday after enraged
residents said two U.S. missiles slammed into a poor district during intensified
air raids on the city.
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- Reuters correspondents counted at least 15 bodies lying
in the street in Baghdad's Shaab district, amid blackened and mangled cars
and rubble from broken buildings. Flames poured from an oil tanker.
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- "There are at least 13 killed and some 30 injured.
Two missiles hit the street," local civil defense official Haneed
Dulaimi told Reuters. Yelling residents pulled a man with a bloody head
from the rubble.
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- U.S. and British spokesmen said they had no immediate
information on the explosions. If the missile strike is confirmed, it will
be a major setback for British and U.S. efforts to reduce public opposition
to the wear by minimizing civilian casualties. Air raids began at dawn
on the seventh day of the war and rumbled on sporadically through the daylight
hours. As blasts rocked the capital, word filtered out of a major overnight
battle between Iraqi infantry and U.S. tanks near the town of Najaf to
the south.
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- Officials in Washington said Iraqi television, a major
link between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his people, was among Wednesday's
targets in the capital.
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- Both Iraq's domestic television and its international
satellite channel returned to the air after the raids.
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- Raids on the outskirts of the city apparently targeted
positions of Saddam's trusted Republican Guard, who are defending Baghdad's
approaches.
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- With a second day of severe sandstorms buffeting both
the capital and U.S. armor advancing toward it, Reuters correspondent Luke
Baker reported a ferocious overnight battle between U.S. tanks and Iraqi
infantry near the Shi'ite Muslim holy city of Najaf.
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- TRAIL OF DEATH
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- U.S. officials said Iraqi infantry attacked the U.S.
Seventh Cavalry, around 100 miles south of Baghdad and suffered heavy casualties.
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- "Apparently ground forces tried to hit some of our
guys with rocket-propelled grenades," one official said, putting the
Iraqi death toll at up to 300. There were no U.S. casualties, he said.
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- British Prime Minister Tony Blair said there were signs
of growing dissent in Iraq's second city of Basra in the south. "Truthfully
reports are confused, but we believe there was some limited form of uprising,"
he told parliament.
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- His defense minister, Geoff Hoon, accused Saddam loyalists
of turning their guns on would-be protesters.
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- But Arab television journalists in the southern city
on Wednesday said there was no sign of a reported uprising.
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- Reuters correspondent Sean Maguire said U.S. Marines
pushing north from the southern town of Nassiriya left a trail of death
as they fought off sporadic Iraqi attacks along the way.
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- Maguire saw about two dozen corpses among wrecked vehicles
littering the road north of the town of Shatra, including a bus with its
back end blown off and bodies hanging out of the back.
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- Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf said
more than 500 people had been wounded and 200 homes destroyed as U.S. forces
stormed through Nassiriya.
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- In the north, Reuters correspondent Mike Collett-White
watched U.S. planes pound Iraqi frontlines near the town of Chamchamal
in Kurdish-controlled areas.
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- The Najaf engagement was one of the fiercest of the war
launched by President Bush to oust Saddam and strip Iraq of alleged weapons
of mass destruction. Baghdad denies having any such weapons.
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- Bush and Blair, his main ally on Iraq, meet in Washington
on Wednesday. The U.N. Security Council holds a public debate at the request
of Arab nations.
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- Investors on world financial markets are sensitive to
U.S. or British setbacks ahead of a battle for the capital, which will
decide the course of the war.
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- Stocks rose and bond prices fell as investors in Europe
shook off early jitters over the course of the war. Oil prices rose on
supply worries. Gold, a traditional safe haven, rose and the dollar was
steady.
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- BASRA UPRISING?
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- British Defense Secretary Hoon told BBC radio in London
that it was not clear what was happening in Basra.
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- "There have been disturbances with local people
rising up against the regime," he said. "There have been attempts
by regime militia to attack those people, their own people, to attack them
with mortars, machinegun fire, rifles and so on."
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- The mainly Shi'ite Muslim people of Basra rose up against
Saddam's Sunni-dominated government after the 1991 Gulf War, but their
revolt was rapidly smashed as U.S. forces stood aside.
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- U.S.-led forces had been hoping the Shi'ite south would
welcome their invasion this time round.
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- But a correspondent of the Qatar-based al-Jazeera Arabic
network in the city said no revolt was apparent.
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- "There are no signs of the reported uprising,"
Mohammed al-Abdallah said. "All we can hear are distant explosions
in the southeast, and we believe fighting is going on there."
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- With the humanitarian situation in Basra causing growing
concern, British naval officers said they had finally secured Iraq's only
deep water port of Umm Qasr on Tuesday.
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- A British navy ship was expected to dock by Thursday,
bringing the first seaborne aid for thousands of hungry and thirsty civilians
in southern Iraq.
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