US attacks airport outside Baghdad

Army forces launched a nighttime attack on Saddam International Airport just outside Baghdad on Thursday and fought running battles with Iraqis along the city's southern fringes. "A vise is closing on the regime," President Bush told cheering Marines stateside.\nSome front-line units went on heightened alert against the threat of chemical weapons, ordered to wear rubber boots and suits despite temperatures that soared into the 90s.\nThere was fierce fighting in Kut, to the south, where desperate Iraqis armed with rifles charged tanks in a suicide raid. "We mowed down" the attackers, said Lt. Col. B.P. McCoy.\nTracer rounds lit the night sky and artillery boomed near the airport a few miles from the heart of Saddam Hussein's capital. Army units encountered little resistance along the airport road, their convoy passing dead Iraqi soldiers and piles of discarded military uniforms.\nAlong the city's southern edge, Army tanks and Bradley vehicles destroyed more than seven Iraqi armored personnel carriers and more than 15 Iraqi tanks in fighting that went on for more than four hours.\nTwo weeks into the war, American commanders reported a string of successes -- on the battlefield and within an Iraqi population initially reticent about embracing invading troops. Kurdish fighters in the north chipped in, when a top leader suggested they may agree not to seek control of the northern city of Kirkuk.\nDespite declarations that tough fighting lies ahead, the nation's top military official indicated there may not be an all-out battle for Baghdad. Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, suggested isolating members of the old regime in place -- cut off from the country -- with an "interim administration" in place to begin work on a postwar government.\nThere were battlefield setbacks, as well. Two Marines were killed and one injured in the close-quarters fighting in Kut. The Navy mounted a search for a pilot missing since his Hornet jet was lost to unknown causes on Wednesday.\nThe toll of American troops dead passed 50, and Bush traveled to Camp Lejeune, N.C., which has lost 13 -- more than any other installation. "He's in heaven," the commander in chief told the family of one fallen Marine in a private moment.\nTo the cheers of thousands earlier in a speech, he vowed victory, and said, "A vise is closing on the regime."\nIraq issued the latest in a series of exhortations in Saddam's name. "Fight them with your hands. God will disgrace them," it said, referring to invading American and British troops.\nBut the daily urgings seemed increasingly at odds with the military situation across the country.\nAs conventional units fought their way to the outskirts of the capital, officials said special forces had raided the Tharthar presidential palace near Tikrit, Saddam's hometown. Documents were seized at the site north of Baghdad, said Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks at U.S. Central Command in the Persian Gulf, but no ranking members of the regime were found.\n"That's all right, he added, "there's other operations ongoing."\nTo the far north, U.S. special forces and Kurdish militiamen captured the town of Bardarash and a nearby bridge, one of few routes into the city of Mosul near government-held oil fields. Iraqis had held the town for 13 years.\nIn the country's southern regions, British forces penetrated closer to the center of Basra, a city of 1.3 million where Iraqi defenders have held out for days. And a private American company worked to extinguish the last two fires at oil wells in American hands since the early days of the war.\nAmerican officials cited continuing examples of Iraqis cooperating with invading troops. In Najaf, they said a prominent cleric under house arrest by the Iraqi government had urged the population not to interfere with the operations of American or British forces.\nDetails were sketchy on the attack on the airport in Baghdad. The facility has one 13,000-foot runway, according to intelligence monitoring organizations, as well as an 8,800-foot runway.\nFor the first time in the war, large parts of Baghdad lost electricity. The cause was not known, and Myers, the Joint Chiefs chairman, told reporters at a Pentagon briefing that Americans had "not targeted the power grid in Baghdad."\nGround forces closed in on Baghdad from separate southern approaches, the Army from the southeast and Marines from the southwest, in advances begun Tuesday night.\nAmerican and British helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft bombed positions in Kut, and Marines and Iraqis lobbed grenades at close quarters.\nBetween 10 and 15 Iraqis armed only with rifles charged Marine tanks in the suicide charge. Two Marines died in the fighting -- and a medic who tried to save one of them sorrowfully buried his resuscitation equipment on the spot.\nArmy forces rolled past dozens of dead Iraqi soldiers and bombed-out hulks of Iraqi military equipment as they made their way toward Baghdad from the area around Karbala. Many more Iraqi soldiers surrendered to the overwhelming force of the Americans, and were shuttled to the rear.\nTheir tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles destroyed more than seven Iraqi armored personnel carriers and more than 15 tanks as they sought out units of the Republican Guard and regular Army troops guarding Baghdad's southern flanks.\nAt the same time they worried about chemical weapons attacks, Brooks disclosed that a special operations force in the southwestern desert had found a number of bottles "marked in strange ways." He said an investigation was underway.\nIn Palestine, W.Va., the parents of Pfc. Jessica Lynch, the rescued prisoner of war, said she had undergone surgery at a military hospital in Germany and was scheduled for more. Gregory Lynch Sr. said doctors had found no evidence of gunshot or stab wounds.\nSeparately, officials said hostile fire was not the cause of the loss of an Army Black Hawk helicopter. Six soldiers were killed when the craft went down, also on Wednesday.