U.S. Marines swept through a northeastern district of Baghdad in the early hours of Thursday, blasting forces still loyal to ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein with heavy artillery, mortars and machinegun fire.
Planes buzzed the area in support of the Marine units and soldiers reported seeing Iraqi anti-aircraft fire arching up into the night sky against the aircraft.
It was not immediately clear how much resistance the U.S. troops had met on the ground during their raid, but as dawn broke over the Iraqi capital, their artillery had fallen quiet and only the occasional rattle of machineguns could be heard, Reuters reported.
Military sources said the nighttime sweep to secure an area around Saddam City, home to about two million impoverished Shi'ite Muslims, was the Marines' final objective on the eastern flank of the city center. "We're running out of battle space," said one Marine as U.S. soldiers converged on Baghdad's city center from the east, south and north.
In the distance, a fire blazed in the top floors of a government ministry close to the river Tigris.
Marines in the area of the Martyrs' Monument, a split dome commemorating Iraq's war with Iran in the 1980s, were patrolling the streets on Thursday morning with no signs of resistance. They said their plan was to search the area and ensure that it was secure.
Leadership disappeared
Meanwhile, as Baghdad fell from Saddam's control, covert CIA and military teams and surveillance devices set up to monitor top Iraqi officials reported that nearly all of them had disappeared, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.
CIA and Special Operations teams targeting the Iraqi leadership discovered that Saddam's Baath Party leaders, Republican Guard leaders, troops and high-level government officials were not at their usual posts on Wednesday, the report said.
"There was no sign of any leaders, anywhere," a senior U.S. administration official was quoted as saying. "All of a sudden, all communications ceased and the regime didn't come to work," a senior administration official told the newspaper.
U.S. military commanders said they suspected that some Iraqi leaders had gone to Saddam's hometown of Tikrit for a final showdown and that others had fled to Syria, The Post reported.
According to the newspaper, CIA analysts reports said the most likely explanation for the sudden drop-off in detectable communications and activity among such a large number of key people is that an order to disappear was given in Saddam's name, and that he is still alive. (Albawaba.com)
© 2003 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
