US and British officers predicted a swift victory yesterday after American armored columns raced deep into Iraq and British marines seized vital oil facilities in the south.
With Iraq putting up only sporadic resistance, the US said it hoped to achieve its war goal of toppling President Saddam Hussein without bringing all its firepower to bear.
Iraq ridiculed the claims of early successes and said the invaders would not leave the country alive. Victory was guaranteed for Iraq, Interior Minister Mahmoud Diyab al-Ahmed told a news conference as he brandished an assault rifle.
Reuters correspondent Luke Baker, with the US 3rd Infantry Division, had advanced at least 150km into Iraq from Kuwait by early yesterday, speeding north towards Baghdad, after the land war began on Thursday night.
British commandos, in a seaborne assault, captured the Faw peninsula on Iraq's southern tip and took control of key oil installations.
But US Marines met tougher resistance at the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr, on the Kuwaiti border, Britain said.
The Marines, operating as part of a British-led force raised the Stars and Stripes over the new port area but were still fighting to secure the whole town.
Hundreds of Iraqis surrendered. Some were killed.
Eight Britons and four Americans also died in a helicopter crash in Kuwait -- the invading forces' first casualties of the war.
US column rolls through desert
US military vehicles rolled across the desert, passing oil fields where Reuters reporter Sean Maguire said he saw towering flames and smoke. British Defense Minister Geoff Hoon said Iraqi troops had set up to 30 oil wells ablaze.
"There was no gunfire. They had a clear path," Maguire said of the long column of military vehicles from the 1st Marine Regiment with which he was travelling. He passed the wrecks of Soviet-made Iraqi tanks destroyed in the 1991 Gulf War.
But correspondent Adrian Croft, attached to a different US Marine unit, said it was pinned down for two hours just inside Iraq by anti-tank missiles and small arms fire. It advanced again after calling in British artillery support.
Live television footage showed US tank units ploughing across the sand with no sign of Iraqi forces, in what appeared to be a flanking move across the western desert, bypassing the cities of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys.
A top US commander predicted a swift victory. "We're into this now, we're going to win it and we're going to win it fast," said Rear Admiral John Kelly, commander of the USS Abraham Lincoln battle group.
A British spokesman, Group Captain Al Lockwood, asked when invading troops would be in the Iraqi capital, told reporters: "If I were a betting man, which I'm not -- hopefully in the next three or four days."
But at a Baghdad news conference, Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf declared the invasion would fail. "We will not let them leave the swamp they have entered. They will meet their fate," he said.
Baghdad was quiet yesterday, the Muslim holy day, after a second volley of US and British cruise missiles rained down overnight following the opening raid on Thursday morning.
One of the targets struck by the missile salvo was Saddam's vast Baghdad palace complex on the banks of the Tigris River. Another housed an office of Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz.
The ruins of a compound used by Saddam's younger son and heir apparent Qusay was still smouldering after 24 hours. But Sahaf said Saddam and his family were safe, dismissing speculation in the West they might have died in the attack.
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