WITH U.S. FORCES IN IRAQ — U.S. and British troops flushed out paramilitary fighters street by street in three cities of central and southern Iraq on Sunday as warplanes hammered the Republican Guard surrounding Baghdad and American soldiers inched to within sight of Karbala, a gateway to the capital.
An American military helicopter crashed in the south, killing three Marines and injuring another, the Pentagon said. A military spokesman said the UH-1 Iroquois helicopter, known as a Huey, went down for undetermined reasons just after sunset near a military base and was not under hostile fire.
Elsewhere on the 11th day of the war, allied forces foiled an apparent suicide-bombing attempt near Najaf, about 90 miles south of Baghdad, and mounted urban firefights against paramilitary forces in Najaf and Nasiriyah, as well as in Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, to defeat irregular forces who have ambushed and harassed them.
During an overnight raid into southern Basra, British commandos reportedly killed several Iraqi officers. One British Royal Marine was killed in the operation, code-named after the fictional British secret agent James Bond. And on the northern front, airstrikes forced Iraqi troops to pull back into the cities of Kirkuk and Mosul.
In Baghdad, airstrikes persisted throughout Sunday and early today. Bombs and missiles hit command centers, a telecommunications exchange, an intelligence complex in the Karada district, and the Abu Ghraib presidential palace, which reportedly belongs to Qusai Hussein, one of Saddam Hussein's two sons.
A residential area was struck Sunday evening, the Arab satellite news station Al Jazeera said. There was no immediate confirmation of the report.
In the move toward Karbala, the 2nd Brigade of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division swept into the town of Hindiya, to the southeast, at dawn today and encountered Iraqi forces at a bridge over the Euphrates River. Armored troops drew sporadic fire from paramilitary and regular Iraqi forces.
The Americans captured several dozen Iraqis and wounded others. The attack sent residents of Hindiya, which has a population of about 100,000, fleeing down streets and alleys.
It brought the 3rd Infantry Division within sight of Karbala and a chokepoint known as Karbala Gap, between Razzaza Lake and the Euphrates, as U.S.-led forces paused to let bombs and missiles pound three divisions of the Republican Guard standing across the gap between them and Baghdad.
