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EAST OF BAGHDAD, Iraq - Thousands of U.S. Marines advanced on the Iraqi capital from the southeast on Friday, moving to within 10 miles of the center and firing artillery as they spread along a broad arc east of the city.
The Marines met little resistance as they streamed toward Baghdad on Friday morning after destroying the remnants of an Iraqi Republican Guard division overnight. But when they began to move out toward the northeast later in the day, the giddiness many of the men felt began to evaporate as new fighting began.
On Friday night, the sky was lighted by the explosion of bombs and the crackle of Iraqi antiaircraft fire, and Marine artillery units were firing 100-pound 155-mm shells toward the city.
One Marine was reported killed in the fighting on Friday. There was no word on Iraqi casualties, but large numbers of destroyed trucks and other equipment were seen during the approach to Baghdad.
The push on Friday by some 14,000 soldiers of the 1st Marine Division was coupled with the advance from the southwest by the Army's 3rd Infantry Division. Marine officers said thousands of Republican Guard soldiers had apparently retreated into the city after their units were broken up.
Between Kut and Baghdad, Marines reported about 2,500 Republican Guards had surrendered. One Marine unit took on so many prisoners of war, it had to create an impromptu prison camp. Troops following the main thrust of U.S. forces passed burning vehicles, civilian and military, and hundreds of dead Iraqis, most in uniform.
A U.S. Super Cobra attack helicopter crashed early today in central Iraq, killing two Marine pilots, the Central Command said.
The cause of the crash of the AH-1W gunship was under investigation, but it did not appear to have gone down as a result of hostile fire, the command said.
Names of the two Marines were withheld pending notification of relatives.
Also Friday, Lt. Gen. T. Michael Moseley, commander of the allied air campaign, said hundreds of warplanes will stay "on top of Baghdad" in a final assault to demolish crumbling Iraqi resistance.
"We're going to keep pounding them," Moseley said by telephone in a rare interview from air command headquarters at a desert air base about 80 miles from Riyadh. "We're going to keep pounding them and killing them until they give up."
Northern IraqDORA: Kurds have bolstered their military presence on the southern edge of their territory just as the United States has begun heavy pounding of nearby Iraqi positions guarding routes to Baghdad.
A collapse of the front lines near this military command post less than 100 miles from Baghdad would open a clear path to the main road from Baghdad to Kirkuk, 18 miles to the west and numerous back roads.
A truck full of armed Kurdish militia drove toward the weakening front that separates Kurdish and Baghdad-controlled forces.
KHAZIR: For a second straight day, a team of Green Berets, its Kurdish allies and dozens of American warplanes attacked as many as 2,000 Iraqi soldiers on a key road to Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city.
Southern IraqSAMAWAH: Facing little resistance from Iraqi troops, paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division crossed the Euphrates River on Friday and now control the major bridges in and out of this city, securing towns and bridges along the U.S. supply line from Kuwait to Baghdad.
U.S. troops flushed the Iraqi soldiers into streets and buildings on the northern outskirts of the southern Iraqi city and picked them off in house-to-house combat. The Iraqis surrendered or were shot.
BASRA: British troops in Challenger II tanks and Warrior armored vehicles staged a midday raid into a neighborhood on the southern edge of Basra on Friday, fighting sometimes fierce close-in combat with Iraqi militiamen and killing at least eight before pulling back, commanders reported.
The battle, one of the heaviest in the two weeks since British forces arrived at Basra's perimeter, came one day after British troops raided and occupied the sprawling grounds of a technical college on the opposite side of the bridge that had been used as a militia firing position.
- Information from the New York Times, Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Associated Press and Times correspondent Borzou Daragahi was used in this report.