Weather Slows Push To Baghdad

The Army's 3rd Infantry Division dashed north Monday toward the Shiite holy city of Karbala, only 50 miles south of Baghdad, but was stalled by a sandstorm that blew out of the desert.

While Iraqi paramilitary units harassed coalition troops from the rear, U.S.-led forces tried to maintain their advance on Baghdad. The troops made a rapid advance under heavy allied air protection that wiped out a column of charging Iraqi armor and sent some of Saddam Hussein's outer defenses withdrawing toward the capital.

But the weather — not Iraqi troops — halted the long columns of thousands of vehicles that were stretched across the desert and farms.

In Baghdad, security and police officers dug more trenches around military offices in the heart of the Iraqi capital, as smoke from fires set to conceal targets from bombing hung over the city Monday.

U.S.-led forces suffered their worst casualties of the war in two bloody battles near an-Nasiriyah that raged for hours before Iraqi resistance was vanquished. Marines, tense and sobered after the fight, were moving around the city rather than through it on the road to Baghdad.

Sunday's battles at an-Nasiriyah drew some attention from the relentless advance of the U.S.-led forces, now less than 100 miles from Baghdad after four days of the ground war.

On Monday, U.S. commander Gen. Tommy Franks said U.S.-led coalition forces are making "rapid and in some cases dramatic" progress in Iraq but also have met sporadic resistance.

"As our troops fight, even in isolated areas, there will be casualties – there have been casualties," Franks said. "Because from the perspective of the fighting man on the ground, even an isolated set of combat situations represents violence which we must see face-to-face."

That violence was present an-Nasiriyah — on the Euphrates River 230 miles southeast of Baghdad, near the ancient town of Ur, birthplace of the patriarch Abraham — where allies sustained their worst casualties so far.

In the face of the resistance, Marines officials said they expected to sidestep an-Nasiriyah rather than fight to capture it — the same strategy they employed in Basra.

He said that U.S. forces had "intentionally bypassed enemy formations," but added that Iraq's "Fedayeen" militia had been harassing the U.S. rear in southern Iraq.

Franks, reacting to battles Sunday in which about 20 U.S. forces were killed or missing as a result of ambushes and a fake surrender, said: "We know that the Fedayeen has in fact put itself in a position to mill about, to create difficulties in rear areas, and I can assure you that contact with those forces is not unexpected."

Franks said cleaning up the bypassed forces would take some time "across the days."

At the briefing, Franks was joined by Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, who showed video taken by attacking warplanes of damage to Iraqi intelligence service complex, a MiG fighter and a tank.

He said ground forces were expanding their control in Iraq.

"That included a continued advance beyond an-Nasiriyah and also an aviation attack on Republican Guards near Baghdad," Brooks said.

An-Nasiriyah was a hotbed of rebellion against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in the Shiite Muslim rebellion that followed the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The Americans may have run into Saddam loyalists based there to keep a lid on the Shiites, along with some Republican Guard units.

The battles left the Americans sobered and wary.

"It's gonna be a long day, I think," said one Marine, his eyes showing his exhaustion from lack of sleep but alert and fixed toward the sands.

In an apparent indication of renewed Iraqi resistance in the south, the U.S. military canceled a news media trip to Iraq's most productive oil field, which allied forces previously claimed to have secured. Marine Capt. Danny Chung said the Rumeila oil field was "unsafe" Monday. He gave no details, but there have been news reports of Iraqi attacks on the field.

Also, a trip for reporters to the southern city of Umm Qasr, where there was sporadic fighting days after the allies took effective control, was canceled as well.

The fighting backed up the long convoy at an-Nasiriyah, where long columns were still arriving along the main road from Kuwaiti border. U.S. officials said their advance on Baghdad was not slowed though they refused to say when they would get there.

Latest bloodshed not withstanding, CBS News analyst and retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Perry Smith believes the casualties sustained by both sides in the current conflict will be significantly lower than the Gulf War of 1991.

"Whereas the coalition, which removed Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991, suffered about 350 combat deaths, I expect that coalition combat deaths in this war will be somewhat less than that number," Smith said.

While he predicts there will much more ground combat, he believes the current conflict will end much sooner than the Gulf War, thereby reducing the number of casualties sustained by coalition troops.

"I expect that historians will probably label this war the "Two Week War" - one week to capture all of the country with the exception of Baghdad and Tikrit and another week to root out the last vestiges of support in those two cities," he says

During the Gulf War of 1991, about 10,000 Iraqi soldiers and 2,500 civilians were killed.

The high use of precision weapons, Smith said, will help reduce civilian casualties considerably.

Navy warships deployed in the eastern Mediterranean fired dozens of Tomahawk cruise missiles at targets in Iraq on Sunday for the first time since the war's start.

In western Iraq, Lt. Gen. John Abizaid said, the forces went after Iraqi logistical targets, command and control facilities and commando units.

Authorities said the number of Iraqi prisoners in allied custody was about 2,000. About 200 were being held at the Tillil Air Base, a dilapidated complex near an-Nasiriyah.

In northern Iraq, coalition warplanes bombed a military barracks on Monday, prompting frightened residents to flee the area as huge plumes of smoke choked the skies.

At least six bombs struck Iraqi positions with such force that the ground shook and windows were shattered about 3 miles away in the city of Chamchamal.

Warplanes continued to fly overhead after the first wave of bombings that struck the Bani Maqem barracks, close to the line that separates the Kurdish-held area, including Chamchamal, from territory under the control of Saddam.