US troops open northern front

A key airfield was taken by about 1,000 United States paratroopers from the army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade who were dropped into the Kurdish controlled region, becoming the first sizeable American military presence in that part of the country.

“This is the beginning of the northern front,” a US official was quoted as saying.

Meanwhile, George Bush, the US president, announced yesterday that he was sending 30,000 more troops to the Gulf to reinforce the coalition forces.

The 4th Infantry Division, one of the best-equipped units in the US army, is to fly to the region by the weekend.

The announcement came amid reports of Saddam’s elite Republican Guard streaming out of Baghdad, bound for a decisive confrontation with US troops in central Iraq.

Allied intelligence was reported to have detected a large convoy of 1,000 vehicles approaching US positions south of the Iraqi capital under cover of a blinding sandstorm.

The reports were, however, played down by the Pentagon.

British strike aircraft were last night over the south of the country, bombarding a separate Iraqi convoy that had burst out of Basra and was headed towards positions held by the Royal Marines on the Al Faw peninsula.

It was not clear if the convoy of up to 120 vehicles, including Soviet-made T55 tanks, Type-59 artillery pieces and armoured personnel carriers, was launching a counter-attack or if the pro-Saddam forces were fleeing the city.

US navy F-18 Super Hornets and RAF Harrier ground attack jets were immediately scrambled from their bases in Kuwait and dropped precision-guided munitions and cluster bombs on the Iraqi armour.

From the ground, the column was pounded by AS90 heavy artillery from 3rd Regiment Royal Horse Artillery and light field guns of 29 Commando Regiment Royal Artillery.

Several vehicles were destroyed before the convoy turned off the main road and dispersed into the surrounding areas south of Basra.

Before the operation in northern Iraq, several hundred special forces troops had been operating with Kurdish groups on the ground in the area.

Northern Iraq is controlled by rival Kurdish factions and is protected from Saddam’s army by US and British aircraft that have patrolled a no-fly zone since a failed Kurdish uprising after the 1991 Gulf War.

A unit of the 173rd Airborne, based in Vicenza, Italy, jumped in to an airfield shortly before midnight, according to Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Collins, of the US Army Southern European Task Force.

“Approximately 1,000 troops went in,” he said.

More paratroops, tanks and other fighting vehicles are expected to follow.

Tony Blair arrived in Washington last night to meet Mr Bush at his Camp David retreat for a war summit. The Prime Minister is understood to have braced himself to urge the Bush administration not to disregard the United Nations when plans are drawn up to rebuild Iraq.

The coalition leaders will be briefed on the latest battlefield information, including the reports that US military intelligence spotted the Republican Guard convoy heading out of Baghdad in the direction of Najaf, the scene of the fiercest fighting of the war so far.

The exact build-up of Iraqi troops was unclear, but it was reported that a force of up to 5,000 Republican Guard soldiers was heading south out of Baghdad.

The elite fighting units were thought to have been taking advantage of two days of sandstorms to avoid being wiped out by coalition air power. Apache helicopter gunships, the main air defence for ground troops, have been grounded for 48 hours.

Walter Rodgers, a CNN journalist who is based with the US 7th Cavalry, said the Republican Guard appeared to be heading straight for its position near Najaf, about 50 miles south of Baghdad.

“Everybody’s sitting on a very tight hair-trigger,” he said. “They are some of the best forces Saddam has and are indeed a serious threat to the area we are in.”

However, Pentagon officials said they were aware only of “defensive repositioning” near Baghdad and had no information on large columns or convoys of Iraqis.

Iraqi officials claimed the first battlefield success for the Republican Guard yesterday, saying a unit in central Iraq had attacked coalition troops and destroyed six vehicles.

A US military officer said there had been a fierce battle for control of a bridge over the Euphrates river at Abu Sukhayr, 13 miles south-east of Najaf. During a 36-hour firefight that claimed up to 1,000 Iraqi lives, two US Abrams tanks were destroyed. The fate of the tank crews remained unclear.

Another series of explosions rocked the centre of Baghdad overnight after a day of heavy air attacks aimed primarily at the outskirts of the Iraqi capital, where the Republican Guard is believed to be stationed.

Earlier, guerrilla attacks were targeted at aid workers attempting to deliver the first batch of desperately needed food and water to civilians outside Basra.

Two mortar bombs exploded 200 yards away from where aid was being distributed in the town of Az Zubayr, where British forces have faced stiff resistance from pockets of militia men armed with rocket-propelled grenades.

The attack came at the end of a dramatic 24 hours in which rumours of a civilian uprising in Basra had resulted in British forces being engaged in sporadic combat throughout the area.

British military commanders aim to ensure that humanitarian aid gets through to Az Zubayr and, ultimately, Basra.

Outside Basra yesterday, a British man who travelled to Iraq to fight for Saddam’s regime was reported to have surrendered.

The man, in his mid-20s, handed himself over to Irish Guards, telling them he wanted to go home to Manchester.