NEAR Nassiriyah, 24 March 2003 — US Marines battled Iraqi fighters for control of the southern Iraqi city of Nassiriyah yesterday, taking “significant” casualties in a fight to open a route north to Baghdad, US officers said.
Reuters Correspondent Sean Maguire, traveling with the Marines First Regiment south of the city, said he could see explosions and huge plumes of smoke over Nassiriyah, on the Euphrates river about 375 km southeast of Baghdad.
“It looks like artillery, or possibly air strikes,” Maguire said. “There’s lots of smoke rising.”
After nightfall, fires were still burning near the bridges.
US field officers said the Marine battalion spearheading the fight had suffered significant casualties in a battle with irregular commandos known as Saddam’s Fedayeen.
They gave no details but a CNN television correspondent at Nassiriyah quoted eyewitnesses in the battle as saying they had seen at least 10 American bodies around an amphibious assault vehicle that had been hit by a rocket-propelled grenade.
Al-Jazeera television aired Iraqi footage of at least four corpses that appeared to be those of US servicemen and of five US prisoners it said were taken in fighting near Nassiriyah.
The firefight with the Fedayeen at Nassiariya blocked an advance by US forces, who had earlier reported securing two key bridgeheads to enable them to cross the Euphrates and strike northwards towards the Iraqi capital.
Maguire said US officers believed the bridgeheads were now secure but that the area in between was not. US troops captured the northern ends of the two bridges in the east of Nassiriyah early yesterday, opening the way for large forces to cross and head north toward the Tigris river and Baghdad. But units of Saddam’s Fedayeen, an irregular militia force of loyalists to President Saddam Hussein, counterattacked. “They’ve been fighting all day. They’re using guerrilla tactics,” one officer said on Sunday evening.
Maguire said there was heavy US helicopter traffic over the area, and that hundreds of US military trucks and armored personnel carriers had stopped their advance.
US officers also said that the 11th Division of the Iraqi Army had “capitulated”. That report could not be confirmed, and no details on the alleged surrender were available.
Iraqi officials on Saturday denied US statements that the commander of the 51st Division had surrendered and a US commander said his forces had fought and defeated elements of the 51st around the southern city of Basra.
Iraqi Information Minister Information Minister Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf told a news conference in Baghdad that foreign invaders headed to Nassiriyah had been “taught a lesson they will never forget”.
“We have placed them in a quagmire from which they can never emerge except dead,” he said.
Speeding columns of the US Third Infantry have covered nearly two thirds of the 500 km from the Kuwaiti border in two days before running into Iraqi resistance near Najaf on the southwest bank of the Euphrates.
A strike north across the river towards the Tigris river and Baghdad could create a pincer movement on the capital.
US officers believe units of President Saddam Hussein’s elite Republican Guards face them near Najaf — the Medina Division — and at other cities south of Baghdad, like Kut on the Tigris, where the Baghdad Division is thought to be based.
