The US has not held general surrender talks with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's government, and efforts to persuade parts of his military to give up did not yield results good enough to avert a major assault, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Friday.
"We have been issuing, through a variety of methods, communications urging the Iraqi military to surrender, and apparently what we have done thus far has not been sufficiently persuasive that they would have done that," Rumsfeld told a Pentagon briefing.
"It may very well be that, with the initiation of the ground war last evening and the initiation of the air war this afternoon, that we may find people responding and surrendering," he said.
Rumsfeld spoke shortly after the US launched a massive aerial bombardment of Baghdad and other locations in Iraq zeroing in on several hundred military targets.
Rumsfeld said a few hundred Iraqi troops had surrendered to invading US and British forces.
Later, US defense officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the commander of the Iraqi regular army's 51st Division surrendered to American Marines advancing through the desert toward Baghdad in southern Iraq. This was the first time a commander of an Iraqi division had surrendered in the war. The second in command also surrendered.
General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Iraqi forces were offering only "sporadic resistance" and some had abandoned positions in the south and north as US ground forces pushed nearly 160km into Iraq and British ground forces made other gains.
Rumsfeld said there was no "country-to-country dialogue taking place" about the idea of a general Iraqi surrender.
US officials said they had used cellular telephone calls, e-mail, leaflets dropped by aircraft and other means to try to persuade Iraqi officers to surrender.
Rumsfeld said on Thursday that the contacts had been made with the dispirited Iraqi regular army, as well as parts of the elite Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard thought to be most loyal to Saddam. On Friday, Rumsfeld said most of the contacts had been with Iraqi forces outside of Baghdad.
A US defense official said Iraqi exiles trained by US forces may be assisting in the contacts.
Rumsfeld said he did not know whether Saddam remained in control of Iraq. Asked if he had any indication that Iraq's leadership had changed hands, he said he had heard "scraps of information" but not enough to be persuasive.
Rumsfeld said the opening strike of the war targeting a headquarters outside Baghdad where the United States believes members of the Iraqi leadership, including Saddam, had gathered had been successful. "The question is, what was in there?"
Asked whether it was too late for Saddam and his two powerful sons, Uday and Qusay, to go into exile, Rumsfeld said, "It is certainly too late for them to stay in power. What they do with themselves is up to them. ... I guess time will tell what kinds of judgments they'll make. So far they've made very poor judgments."
He said the decision to launch the ground and air campaign was a direct result of the fact that "Saddam Hussein and his crowd did not leave the country."
Myers said the US now had troops in western and northern Iraq in addition to the south and were putting more troops into northern Iraq. US officials said that American Special Operations troops captured two key airfields in the Iraqi desert between 225km and 290km west of Baghdad in a move to surround the capital.
RSS