US forces stepped up the pressure on Iraqi troops by sending the 101st Airborne Division and their Apache attack helicopters into action late Friday against Iraqi positions near Karbala, 80km southwest of Baghdad.
US military officials said the strikes on the Medina Division of Iraq's elite Republican Guard, in position around Karbala to guard the western approaches to Baghdad, left 55 Iraqi soldiers dead and destroyed 25 vehicles.
Officials have said US forces are trying to weaken the Republican Guard ahead of a major push to Baghdad.
US President George W. Bush and his top aides vigorously defended their strategy after a senior US field commander gave a downbeat progress report.
"The enemy we're fighting is different from the one we'd war-gamed against," Lieutenant General William Wallace told The Washington Post from the 101st's headquarters in central Iraq, adding the war could drag on much longer than originally predicted.
Bush nonetheless said Friday the US-led forces were making "great progress," and US Air Force General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, praised the broad battle plan as "brilliant."
A British military spokesman played down reports of a pause in the ground campaign, calling the reorganization of ground forces "purely a case of shaping the battlefield."
The Pentagon said 34 US soldiers had been killed so far during the campaign, with another 104 wounded, 15 missing and seven taken prisoner. British military sources say 23 of their troops have been killed since the start of the war.
Anti-war demonstrators around the world geared up for another weekend of widescale protests, with thousands marching yesterday in Bangladesh, Malaysia and South Korea.
Tens of thousands were expected to turn out later in the day in London, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, Rome, Athens and cities across Europe.
On the diplomatic front, the UN adopted a resolution allowing the resumption under sole UN authority of humanitarian aid for Iraq through its "oil-for-food" program, suspended at the start of the war.
But Iraq yesterday rejected the move, with Sahhaf saying the program could not go forward without Baghdad's consent.
The US-led force's effort to bring drinking water and food supplies to the Iraqi people began yesterday in the southern port of Umm Qasr, where Iraqis crowded around a water tanker that arrived from Kuwait aboard a British ship.
In the southern city of Basra, just north of Umm Qasr, British troops were treating civilian casualties who were wounded after coming under mortar fire while trying to flee the besieged port.
A British military spokesman named Iraq's ruling Baath party as the main objective in Basra, Iraq's second city, but said troops were in "no rush" to enter the city.
Elsewhere, Iran yesterday denied allegations by US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that it was interfering with the US-led war effort, with a government spokesman stressing Tehran's "policy of neutrality."
Rumsfeld charged that military equipment had crossed into Iraq from Syria- and Iran-based rebels.
Syria, the only Arab member of the UN Security Council, also dismissed the claims.
RSS