US troops engage Guard

Army ground forces attacked Republican Guard units Tuesday near Karbala, only 50 miles from Baghdad, part of around-the-clock combat pointing toward an assault on the capital. \nDefense officials said Army units attacked elements of the Medina Division of the Republican Guard, part of an elite Iraqi force targeted by heavy air bombardment over several days.\nSeparately, Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks announced the rescue of an unidentified American POW rescued in Iraq. \n"Coalition forces have conducted a successful rescue mission of a U.S. Army prisoner of war held captive in Iraq. The soldier has been returned to a coalition-controlled area," he said in a brief appearance at U.S. Central Command in Qatar.\nOther officials said the prisoner was one of seven the Pentagon lists as captured since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom on March 19.\nThe developments unfolded as huge explosions rocked Baghdad, Saddam Hussein's seat of power and the site of repeated bombing in the two weeks of the war.\nSaddam summoned his country -- via a spokesman -- to a "jihad," or holy war, against the invaders. American and British officials used the occasion to raise fresh doubts about the fate of a man seen in public only on videotape since the war began.\nThe attack on forces near Karbala marked the first major ground battle against Saddam's Republican Guard, and capped a day of aggressive American and British military actions.\nMarines staged a nighttime raid on Nasiriyah and found Iraqis had abandoned a huge, walled police compound.\nIn Basra, a city of 1.3 million, warplanes dropped 500-pound and 1,000-pound laser-guided bombs on an Iraqi intelligence complex in an effort to dislodge die-hard defenders who have kept British forces at bay for days.\n"What you're seeing today on the battlefield in Iraq is a continuation of prepping the battlefield for a major encounter with the Republican Guard," said Navy Capt. Frank Thorp.\nCommanders refused to say when that might come, or whether the attack near Karbala represented the beginning of a push toward the capital. But senior American officials said the ceaseless pounding on Saddam's elite Republican Guard was taking its toll. "Some of them have been degraded to pretty low percentages of combat capability, below 50 percent in ... at least two cases, and we continue to work on them," Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the Pentagon.\nDespite the summons to jihad issued in Saddam's name, British officials said two would-be suicide attackers had turned themselves in to troops in Umm Qasr. "They didn't want to be suicide bombers any more," said British Col. Steve Cox. "We are accommodating them."\nOther British and American officials said there was a growing list of examples of Iraqi civilians shedding their initial reluctance to assist forces fighting Saddam's regime.\nTroops worked to win the trust of Iraqis, keeping in mind that many still recall promises of liberation in the 1991 Gulf War, only to find Saddam's forces returned unhindered when coalition forces withdrew.\nLights went on for the first time in weeks in the port city of Umm Qasr, which is firmly under British control. Some British forces in southern Iraq were wearing berets in public, shedding their more warlike helmets in areas deemed safe.\nThe American and British bombing was constant -- large explosions reverberated around Baghdad, punctuated by a series of small ground engagements in a sweeping arc to the south.\nA Marine official said heavy bombing was carried out around Kut, southeast of Baghdad, adding that ground forces have secured an air base further to the south, at Qalat Sukkar, that could be used as a staging ground.\nFurther to the southwest, Marines claimed to have killed at least 80 Iraqi soldiers and taken dozens of prisoners in fighting near Diwaniyah. According to reports from the field, troops on a reconnaissance mission found fortified Iraqi positions along a line leading several miles to the city.\n"They were shooting from buildings, from dugout positions, from holes, from everywhere," Cpl. Patrick Irish said of the Iraqis.\nMarines took no chances with prisoners, bulldozing a pit, then surrounding it with barbed wire. Before a POW was put inside, he was blindfolded and searched, one Marine pinning down his feet, another his arms, and a third pointing an M-16 rifle at his head.\nIn northern Iraq, U.S. special forces troops trumpeted their role in a successful joint effort with Kurdish fighters to rout Ansar al-Islam militants accused of having ties to al Qaeda terrorists.\nOne day after American forces killed at least seven civilians at a checkpoint, Iraqi officials said U.S. Apache helicopters attacked a neighborhood in the central Iraq city of Hillah, killing 33 people and injuring more than 300.\nThe U.S. Central Command said it was investigating, but said no Apache helicopters could have been involved in any such incident.\nAt the Pentagon, Rumsfeld and Myers, the nation's top uniformed officer, emphatically defended the American battle plan, which has sparked controversy.\n"Forces are coming (toward Baghdad) from the north, they're coming from the south and they're coming from the west, and the circle is closing" on Saddam, Rumsfeld said.\nMyers and Rumsfeld both said some Republican Guard units had been repositioned from north of Baghdad to offset losses suffered by units in the south.\nResponding to a suggestion from a Saudi official that Saddam step down to spare his country, Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan replied: "Go to hell."\nAnd in a speech read in Saddam's name, Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf urged Iraqis to wage a holy war against U.S.-led forces. "Strike at them, fight them. They are aggressors, evil, accursed by God the exalted. You shall be victorious and they shall be vanquished."\n"It does seem very strange that he hasn't appeared at this time," said a British spokesman in London.\nSaddam has been shown in a series of videotaped appearances on Iraqi television during the war, but has made no known public appearances since the night of March 19, when American missiles hit a complex in Baghdad where he and his two sons were believed to have been sleeping.