U.S. makes some gains, suffers setbacks in Iraq

(WASHINGTON POST) Against a backdrop of artillery fire and screaming jetplanes, U.S. Marines fought their most pitched battle of the five-day-old war in Iraq today when they captured two bridges critical to the U.S. drive to cross the Euphrates River and capture Baghdad.

U.S.-led forces in Iraq also suffered some setbacks, with a group of U.S. troops taken prisoner by Iraq and displayed on television in graphic footage that also showed dead soldiers who appeared to have been executed.

Senior U.S. officials confirmed that as many as 12 American soldiers were missing and presumed captured and that an unspecified number of Marines were killed and wounded in the fierce fighting around Nasiriyah, a strategic city that straddles the Euphrates in southern Iraq.

The Arab satellite television network al Jazeera showed a group of soldiers in Iraqi custody who appeared to be Americans, including a woman, and the bodies of others, including another woman. Pentagon officials said all were alive when captured.

A U.S. television reporter accompanying troops in Nasiriyah said the soldiers apparently drove through the town, realized they had strayed into an unsecured area, and were confronted by Iraqi troops when they turned back.

"We don't know all the details yet," President Bush told reporters as he returned to the White House from the Camp David presidential retreat. "We do know that we expect them to be treated humanely just like we are treating the prisoners of their's that we capture humanely."

The prisoners shown were from a supply convoy that was ambushed during heavy fighting near Nasiriyah, U.S. officials said. The troops who were captured were not Marines but soldiers from an Army maintenance unit.

It was not clear whether the television pictures of the prisoners shown by al Jazeera were videotaped by the Arab satellite network or obtained from the Iraqi military or state-run media. One sequence showed gruesome images of four dead male soldiers lying on the floor of a room the announcer said was a morgue. Two of them appeared to have been shot in the head, although they had multiple wounds so the cause of their death could be open to question. The clothing of all four was in disarray. Another clip showed what appeared to be five dead soldiers, but it was not clear whether that group included the previous four. A final segment showed five Americans, including a woman, under interrogation by Iraqis.

The Iraqis asked the prisoners their names and home towns, and such questions as "Why did you come here?" and "Why do you fight Iraqis?"

Throughout today there has been bad news for the United States and Britain, its chief ally in the campaign to destroy the regime of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. Some bad news was self-inflicted, including an announcement that a British warplane was shot down by a U.S. Patriot antimissile battery and that a soldier in the U.S. 101st Airborne Division was taken into custody in a grenade attack on his comrades in which one soldier died. Heavy fighting also broke out in areas of southern Iraq thought to have been secured. "It's the toughest day of resistance that we've had thus far," said U.S. Army General John Abizaid at a news conference at the U.S. Central Command headquarters in Qatar. "We understand that there may be other tough days ahead of us but the outcome is still certain." But the capture of the eastern bridges in Nasiriyah was a major step in the U.S. war plan. In today's battle there, Iraqi regular army units pounded approaching Marines with tanks, artillery and mortars in an effort to retain control of the bridges. Separate militia or paramilitary squadrons dressed in black also sniped at the U.S. troops with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, while Iraqis pretending to surrender ambushed a pair of Marines.

The Marines suffered casualties but estimates of how many changed throughout the day. "It's probably the heaviest fighting we've had, or some of the heaviest fighting," said Lt. Col. George Smith, a top officer at the Camp Commando base in Kuwait. But Smith played down the strategic significance of the day's fighting. "We'd always planned for them to fight. They're just demonstrating that they're fighting."

The six-hour firefight ended after the Marines called in a devastating air armada, including F/A-18 Hornet fighter jets, AV-8 Harrier warplanes, A-10 Warthog tank killers and AH-1 Cobra attack helicopters. "We had the full package," said Lt. Col. David Pere, the senior watch officer at the Marines' command center. "We had everything. We had fixed-wing, we had rotary and we had direct fire."

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The Marines reported destroying 10 T-55 tanks as well as an artillery battery and an antiaircraft gun belonging to Iraq's 51st Infantry Division, which had been deemed one of the country's weaker units by U.S. analysts before the war. Marine officers made no estimate of enemy casualties.

While the Marines and Army pushed closer to Baghdad, U.S. and British forces struggled to pacify areas they previously seized back in southwestern Iraq near the Kuwaiti border. Fierce fighting erupted again in Umm Qasr, the Persian Gulf port that Marine officers have declared "secured" twice already, and around Basra, the country's second-largest city. British forces reported taking Iraq's naval base at Zubair about 20 miles north of Umm Qasr.

U.S. and British commanders said that while regular army units were not posing much threat any more in the south, paramilitary forces called Saddam's Fedayeen were mounting a relentless series of generally small-scale attacks to keep the coalition forces on their heels. The fighters sometimes dressed in civilian clothes to fool American troops and were fighting like "fanatics," several officers said.

"What we're finding throughout the area is small groups of determined men, probably Fedayeen, loyalists, fanatics, who are in a limited way fighting in quite a determined manner," said Lt. Col. Jamie Martin, the chief British liaison at Marine headquarters. "They're a nuisance rather than a significant threat, but they're a nuisance to soft-skinned logistics vehicles and the like." — Thomas W. Lippman and Keith B. Richburg

(Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Keith Richburg contributed to this story.)