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THE ATTACK

3 Journalists Die in U.S. Strikes on 2 Baghdad Buildings

By JOHN F. BURNS

AGHDAD, Iraq, April 8 — Scenes of near panic broke out today inside the Palestine Hotel here, with journalists rushing down darkened stairwells to the hotel forecourt, many wearing flak jackets and helmets, to escape a strike on the building that killed two of their colleagues.

The strike was inflicted by an American tank shell that destroyed a room on the 15th floor on the hotel's east side with a view of the battle raging across the Tigris River at the presidential compound.

Several reporters described seeing one of three tanks that had taken up positions on the western edge of the Jumhuriya bridge, a mile away to the northwest, raising its barrel and rotating it towards the Palestine moments before the impact.

In a room four floors down, about 100 feet from the point where the tank shell hit between the two rooms, the building shuddered as if an earthquake had struck.

Reports from the American military headquarters in Qatar quoted officers as saying at first that the tank fired only after it was fired at from positions in the hotel, an assertion challenged by witnesses.

The military did not reiterate the assertion of sniper fire in a later briefing. Officials said the strike on the Palestine and two other journalistic targets were being investigated.

"This coalition does not target journalists," said Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks at Central Command.

He added that "anything that has happened as a result of our fire or other fires would always be considered as an accident."

The third journalist killed in an American strike today was Tariq Ayoub, 34, a reporter and producer for Al Jazeera television, the Qatar-based Arabic satellite channel. Mr. Ayoub, a Jordanian, was standing on the roof, preparing a live broadcast of the warfare in Baghdad, when the building was hit, a spokesman for the channel, Jihad Ballout, said at its headquarters in Doha, Qatar.

Mr. Ayoub was carried to a car by colleagues but died on the way to the hospital, Mr. Ballout said.

Abu Dhabi television said its offices, not far from Al Jazeera's, were hit by small-arms fire.

In the Palestine, many journalists had taken up positions on balconies on the hotel's northern side, on floors high enough to be able to have a clear view of the fighting going on. The two journalists killed, both of them television cameramen, were on balconies on the 14th and 15th floors, in rooms that were one above the other.

Taras Protsyuk, 35, a Ukrainian citizen who was working for Reuters, was pronounced dead at the hospital within an hour, and José Couso, 37, a Spaniard working for a Spanish channel, Telecinco, died in surgery.

Iraqi officials joined with reporters in carrying the injured journalists down to the hotel forecourt, some of them in bloodied bedsheets. The three other Reuters staff members, one of them Lebanese, one British and one Iraqi, were expected to recover.

Muted scenes of anger were visible among colleagues of the two cameramen killed by the American tank shell at the Palestine Hotel, and among friends of Mr. Ayoub, the Al Jazeera cameraman killed during the day.

The journalists at the Palestine organized a 20-minute candlelit vigil at the hotel after dark, and debated among themselves whether there was justification in grieving for three dead journalists in a city where dozens of Iraqi civilians — people who mostly had no choice about being in Baghdad, unlike the journalists, all of whom are volunteers for the wartime assignment — had been killed on the same day.

IRAQI CAPITAL

Key Section of City Is Taken in a Street-by-Street Fight

By JOHN F. BURNS

AGHDAD, Iraq, April 8 — The battle for the heart of Baghdad began before dawn within the sprawling gardens of Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace and tapered off by early afternoon with the Americans in control of an area running perhaps two miles along the Tigris's western embankment and a mile or more back from the river.

American tanks moving out of the northern end of the presidential compound into the city's open streets fired repeatedly in the direction of the Information Ministry and the Iraqi broadcasting headquarters, and came under heavy rocket, machine-gun and mortar fire in return.

Progress was halting, but the sector under American control by evening included many of the buildings considered to have been at the heart of Saddam Hussein's power: several of his palaces, at least six ministries, the main Baghdad railway station, the Al Rashid hotel, the Parliament building, the government's main conference center, and the principal government broadcasting headquarters, beside the Information Ministry near the river.

Iraqi state television fell silent and the daily statement from the Iraqi information minister describing all the advances claimed by American forces as fantasy and lies changed to a vow to "pummel the invaders." There were clear signs that Mr. Hussein's grip on power was crumbling.

Until the breakout by the Americans today, it had been possible to believe, if only just, that the Iraqi minister, Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, might not be whistling Dixie, in his accustomed way, when he predicted that the Americans would be slaughtered in a huge Iraqi counterattack.

Today, his credibility disintegrated entirely.

One of Mr. Sahhaf's top officials, a man who has frequently sought to intimidate Western reporters, was seen in the parking lot of the Palestine Hotel in tears, embracing another official as if for courage.

In the streets for miles around the hotel, the only armed men to be seen were clumps of exhausted, distracted-looking militiamen, slumped in battered armchairs, rifles set aside, drawing heavily on cigarettes.

If there is to be a last-ditch fight by the Republican Guard, Mr. Hussein's vaunted troops, or by fanatical irregular forces, the men in black tank suits who are the most feared of the Iraqi leader's enforcers, they were nowhere to be seen.

It was not clear if Mr. Hussein himself was alive. His personal fate remained uncertain as Iraqi rescue teams worked through the day to dig into the rubble of several upscale homes in the Mansur district of west Baghdad that were obliterated by an American bombing attack on Monday afternoon that United States commanders said was intended to kill the Iraqi leader.

Rescue workers pulling at the rubble in a crater 60 feet deep told reporters that they believed as many as 14 people had been killed in the attack, but responded with blank stares and agitated gestures when they were asked if the victims might have included Mr. Hussein.

As dusk fell, the area held by the Americans fell silent, suggesting that Iraqi resistance — fought relentlessly but ultimately hopelessly with rockets, machine guns and other light arms — had died away.

The American advance was secured in street-by-street battles with tanks and other armored vehicles; a foothold in Saddam Hussein's main presidential compound on the Tigris River was transformed into a bastion of several square miles.

Dogs ran wild in every neighborhood, perhaps abandoned by their owners as they fled for the countryside. Whipping winds toward the late afternoon added to the air of desolation, pulling at mounting piles of garbage on sidewalks and sending some of the refuse rolling like tumbleweed down the empty streets. Gas stations, with long waits only days ago, were virtually abandoned, too.

Hospitals were islands of frantic activity, as cars and pickup trucks joined ambulances in rushing injured civilians to casualty units that were overwhelmed.

The toll on Iraqis appeared to have been severe. Senior officials at the Palestine Hotel on the river's eastern bank, where most international journalists are lodged, were seen clutching each other in distress. Whether that was from concern about their personal safety or about the pounding being taken by Iraqi forces could not be known.

IRAQI CAPITAL

Key Section of City Is Taken in a Street-by-Street Fight

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The American advance was supported by a lone A-10 Warthog tankbuster plane that dived repeatedly through clouds of black smoke from oil fires lighted around the city in the last two weeks in a bid to hinder American bombing.

The plane appeared to be loosing heavy volleys of large-caliber cannon rounds at Iraqi positions ahead of and around the tanks. Bursts of fire and smoke exploded in the battle zone, and some fires continued burning for hours.

Later, an A-10 was shot down near Baghdad's international airport by an Iraqi surface-to-air missile, Central Command announced. The pilot bailed out and was quickly recovered. It was not clear if this was the same plane.

Independent estimates of casualties among American and Iraqi troops, or of damage to buildings in the area, were unavailable because all four bridges in the center of the city leading from the Tigris's eastern bank were blocked by the fighting, and all city telephones in Baghdad went out under American bombing last week.

The American gains in western Baghdad were matched by similar American progress in the southeast of the city, where marines supported by Apache helicopters seized control of Al Rashid military base, about three miles from the point where the eastern bank of the Tigris faces the Republican Palace on the west.

Coupled with American advances into northern Baghdad, the advances appeared to place American commanders in a position to mount a pincers movement that could give them control of both sides of the river in central Baghdad far sooner than some commanders had predicted, presenting the Iraqis with the loss of the core of their capital city barely three weeks after the war began.

At least three, and possibly all four, of the central bridges connecting the relatively open terrain of the government quarter in western Baghdad to the densely-populated business and residential districts of eastern Baghdad, home to many of this city's 4.5 million people, appeared to be under effective American control.

American tanks advanced part-way across the bridges to a point where they could fire at will at any Iraqis approaching the bridges from the eastern end, where what is left of Mr. Hussein's once-consuming power now resides.

Iraqi casualties appeared to be heavy. Reporters visiting only one of the city's major hospitals, the Kindi in eastern Baghdad, were told by doctors that the battle for control of the government quarter had brought in 200 to 300 civilian casualties, among them 35 dead.

On a bloodied gurney inside, a 50-year-old man who gave his name as Talib said he had been selling cigarettes from a hand cart in Al Alawi Square, near the city's main bus station about a mile from the Tigris, when he was hit by shrapnel from an American tank round. Left alone by doctors who appeared to have judged his injuries not to be life-threatening, the man let out repeated roars of pain, saying he had been hit in the back. "Is this Bush's promised `liberation'?" he shouted.

Daubing the white tiles of the wall beside him with his blood, he added: "No this is a red liberation, a liberation written in blood. Bush said he would disarm Saddam, and look how he's doing it now — killing us, one by one. Please ask him, how do you liberate people by killing them?"

One man in a green hospital smock, apparently despairing at the sight of newly arriving dead and wounded, threw a punch at a French photographer, striking her only lightly but unbalancing himself and falling to the ground. Other medical staff members hurriedly urged the journalists to leave, fearing, they said, that more serious injury could be done to them if they lingered.

The heavy bombing on Monday aimed at killing Mr. Hussein had a profound psychological effect on the city. Workers gathered around the wreckage of a restaurant adjoining the crater left by the bomb, the Sa'ah, on 14th of Ramadan Street, seemed at a loss when asked who had been killed in the bombing. The restaurant was a favorite of the Iraqi political elite, with its black marbled facade and fast-food kebabs.

This morning, the official Iraqi television failed to broadcast a regular news bulletin, and showed instead only old footage of Mr. Hussein receiving popular adulation at rallies.

Shortly after 11 a.m., amid the rage of battle around the broadcast center, television screens went blank, and the government radio went off the air.

IRAQI CAPITAL

Key Section of City Is Taken in a Street-by-Street Fight

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Iraqi drivers for some senior officials said they had fled the Palestine and an adjoining hotel and headed out into the Iraqi hinterland by the one exit road apparently not yet blocked by American forces: north-eastward toward the Iranian border.

The growing dominance of American forces became clear toward evening when two F-18 Hornets came high out of the milky sun of the late afternoon, launching missile after missile at a 15-storey building on the Tigris River's eastern bank that has served as a sniper's nest for Iraqi fighters firing at American tanks on the opposite bank.

Their target, caramel yellow with black trim, and arched upper windows that served perfectly all day as a launch pad for the rockets and machine-gun and mortar fire the Iraqis rained on the Americans, was the Board of Youth and Sports, a totemic stronghold of Mr. Hussein's older son, Uday.

That made the attack deeply symbolic, since Uday, 38, has used his father's power to proclaim himself the czar of Iraqi sports — with the malevolent twist that several of the sports buildings he controls, according to Iraqis and countless Western human rights reports, have been used as centers for torturing all who vex the younger Mr. Hussein.

Those unfortunates, Iraqis say, have ranged from losing members of the national soccer team to anyone who whispers criticism of Mr. Hussein the father or Mr. Hussein, the firstborn son.

How Iraqis will respond when the Iraqi ruler and his sons are finally toppled will be central to the judgments history makes of the war, and perhaps a foretaste came on the fifth or sixth run of one of the F-18's.

A missile was fired from low altitude and struck a bulls-eye on the building's southern facade, at about the 10th floor, setting off a fireball leaping into the sky, followed by a plume of thick black smoke.

An Iraqi man of about 30, wearing a track suit and watching from a window on an upper floor of the Sheraton Hotel a mile down the river to the south, leaned out to shout something to two reporters for American publications who had made of their own 12th-floor balcony a grandstand seat.

Thumbs up, grinning, the man punched the air, triumphant.

Only in afterthought, perhaps concerned that he might have been overheard by other Iraqis, or perhaps that he might be identified from reports the Americans would write, did he retract — with a scatological outburst about America, but still with the same broad grin.

Until today, American airstrikes had come mostly like thunderbolts, bombs and missiles invisible until impact, the aircraft delivering the bombs so high, so fast, or so enveloped by night that they were phantoms to the people of Baghdad.

No longer. For 30 minutes, the American planes soared and banked and dived, disappearing at one moment into skies turned inky black by the burning oil trenches around Baghdad that have been lit in an attempt to foil American air attacks, returning the next lower, faster, gunmetal gray in the evening sun.

IN BAGHDAD

Still Descends on Baghdad After Raging Street Battles

By JOHN F. BURNS

AGHDAD, Tuesday, April 8 - A still descended on the city after raging battles that lasted all morning and left the Americans in firm control of an area encompassing the principal seats of governmental power.

American forces held an area stretching upwards of a mile and a half along the western bank of the Tigris River, and inland at least a mile deep. That area contains several presidential palaces and ministries, including the Information and Planning departments, the radio and television center and the Al Rashid and Mansour hotels. The Americans also took at least one of the three bridges across the Tigris.

The day's battle lasted six or seven hours and appeared to have involved American tanks and infantry moving north from the Republican palace which the Americans seized in a raid from the airport at dawn on Monday.

Overnight these forces battled through pitched blackness, without a moon and with the city's electrical system shut down. Iraqi forces fought back from inside the palace and suicide bombers threw themselves against tanks.

At the Palestine Hotel, a thousand yards away, sounds of fire were heard and flashes from tanks were seen lighting up the gates and gardens of the palace. At dawn, the Americans moved north from the palace which lies on a bend in the Tigris up the riverbank toward the rest of the presidential compound, crossing through areas that have been heavily bombed in the past 18 days.

The toll on Iraqis appeared to have been severe, and senior Iraqi officials at the Palestine Hotel were seen clutching each other with tears rolling down their faces, whether for concern about their personal safety or about the pounding being taken by Iraqi forces could not be known. That pounding includes a devastating assault Monday that targeted Saddam Hussein and his two sons at a large residential compound in the Mansour district.

Iraqi television devoted its broadcasts through Tuesday morning, at the height of the battle in the presidential compound, to old film of Mr. Hussein being greeted by an adoring crowd accompanied by choirs singing praises to him and his sons, routine fare for Baghdad TV, and thus no firm indicator of whether the leader had survived.

The TV went off the air in the late morning after American troops pushed out of the presidential compound and made their way up a boulevard about a thousand yards further north, to the area of the Information Ministry and broadcast center.

The battle heightened as American troops reached the point where the compound abuts the Al Jumhiriya bridge, one of three midtown bridges. Bursts of fire escaped from the muzzles of Abrams tanks, and Iraqi defenders fought back with machine gun and rocket fire. American A-10 Warthog tank-buster aircraft hovered in the dense black smoke above the battle, diving every few minutes and releasing bombs on Iraqi positions.

At about 8:45 a.m., three Abrams tanks moved onto the bridge and advanced about 500 yards toward the eastern bank, halting for three hours at the first bridge support. The tanks could be seen firing shells at Iraqi targets on the bank, including a 10-story building south of the bridge, from which rifle, rocket and machine gun fire had been directed at the tanks.

Resistance from the building appeared to subside after the Americans fired about a dozen shells. The tanks later turned their barrels across the river and to the south, in the direction of Iraqi targets a mile or more away.

At this point reporters in the Sheraton Hotel adjacent to the Palestine could see an intensive battle raging along Al Rashid military airfield about five miles away; that apparently was the point of the furthest advance of American marines, who crossed a tributary of the Tigris on Monday.

In the early afternoon a shell evidently struck the Palestine Hotel, destroying a room on the 15th floor on the east side with a view to the battle that was raging across the river at the presidential compound. Five journalists in the room at the time were injured including four Reuters staff members and a Spanish television cameraman.

The wounded were carried out of the hotel and taken by car to Iraqi hospital, where their injuries were described as serious. One was a woman carried out wrapped in a bloodied sheet.

An American general, Gen. Buford Blount, commander of the Third Infantry Division, was quoted on the Reuters news wire shortly after the incident saying that an American tank had fired a single round at the hotel.

``The tank was receiving small arms fire and RPG fire from the hotel and engaged the target with one tank round,'' the general said, referring to rocket-propelled grenades.

In the hours before the strike, Iraqi fighters had taken positions in buildings adjacent to the Palestine and Sheraton hotels to fire against the Americans.

The attack led to scenes of near panic inside the Palestine Hotel, with journalists rushing down darkened stairwells to the hotel forecourt, many in flight jackets and helmets.

Some senior Iraqi officials appeared to have abandoned the hotel where they took up residence during the first 20 days of the war in an apparent attempt to find safety for themselves in a building they assumed would be immune from bombing and ground fire. Journalists tempted to leave the immediate area were ordered to remain.

Despite the ferocious fighting, some elements of normal daily life continued. Taxis painted their regulation orange and white could be seen cruising for fares, and a horse-drawn dray moved slowly down the street behind the Palestine Hotel delivering water supplies to homes and businesses.

People could be seen clustering under building eaves, seeking protection from the battle, while others dashed across the street, glancing to the battles in the north. By lunchtime, as the battle subsided, government workers appeared to check through the neighborhood for damage.

Two Iraqi Ministries Are Afire After U.S. Warplanes Strike

By JOHN F. BURNS with JANE PERLEZ

AGHDAD, April 8 — United States forces launched an air and artillery assault on central Baghdad this morning, targeting government buildings in the heart of the city. The Planning Ministry and the Information Ministry were on fire after low flying American planes attacked the center, and bursts of Howitzer fire sounded across the city.

Armored vehicles fired cannons and machine guns across the Sinak bridge at Iraqi forces on the eastern side. In a show of force that also symbolized American ease of movement, two Abrams tanks drove onto the central Jumhuriya bridge over the river Tigris and fired from their positions.

An A-10 Thunderbolt tank-busting plane that had apparently taken part in the assault crashed near the Baghdad airport. The pilot ejected and was safe, American military officials said.

On the southeast edge of Baghdad, in an area of low sand-colored houses, American marines encountered bursts of small arms fire at midmorning and one Marine was wounded in the leg.

At least three journalists were reported killed and several others injured during the fighting.

On Monday an Air Force bomber dropped four 2,000-pound bombs on a Baghdad neighborhood in an attempt to kill Saddam Hussein and his sons. Bush administration and military officials said that the attack came just 45 minutes after the C.I.A. passed on a tip to military planners that Mr. Hussein and other Iraqi leaders were meeting at a house in Mansur, an exclusive residential neighborhood where top leaders are known to assemble.

It was unclear whether anyone was killed or wounded in the bombardment, which American military officials said left a "huge smoking hole."

President Bush said today that he did not know whether or not the Iraqi leader survived the attack.

"The only thing I know is that he is losing power," the president said at a news conference in Ulster at the conclusion of a two-day meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. "The grip I used to describe that Saddam had around the throats of the Iraqi people are loosening. I can't tell you if all ten fingers are off their throats, but finger-by-finger it's coming off."

Mr. Bush added: "We will not stop until they are free. Saddam Hussein will be gone. It might have been yesterday."

In the hours just after dawn today, two Arab satellite television offices were hit in downtown Baghdad. Al Jazeera television said its base at a house not far from the Ministry of Information was hit by two air to surface missiles. An Al Jazeera reporter, Tariq Ayoub, was killed. Abu Dhabi television said its office, not far, from Al Jazeera was hit by small arms fire.

At least two other journalists were killed when the Palestine Hotel, where international journalists are working, was hit during a round of shelling by the Americans.

Reuters announced that one of its television cameramen — Taras Protsyuk, 35, a Ukrainian national based in Warsaw — died when the hotel room where he working was hit by a tank shell. At least three other employees of the news agency were wounded.

In Madrid, officials of the Telecino Spanish television station said today that one of their cameramen had died of injuries he sustained in the blast. The cameraman, Jose Couso, 37, lost a leg and suffered injuries to the jaw.

For a second day in a row, the defiant information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, appeared at a roadside news conference to tell reporters that the invaders were being defeated even though his own ministry was not secure enough for him to preside over.

The raging battles have left the Americans in firm control of an area encompassing the principal seats of governmental power.

American forces held an area stretching upwards of a mile and a half along the western bank of the Tigris River, and inland at least a mile deep. That area contains several presidential palaces and ministries, including the Information and Planning departments, the radio and television center, and the Al Rashid and Mansour hotels. The Americans also took at least one of the three bridges across the Tigris.

Two Iraqi Ministries Are Afire After U.S. Warplanes Strike

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Today's battle lasted six or seven hours and appeared to have involved American tanks and infantry moving north from the Republican palace that the Americans seized in a raid from the airport at dawn on Monday.

Overnight these forces battled through pitched blackness, without a moon and with the city's electrical system shut down. Iraqi forces fought back from inside the palace and suicide bombers threw themselves against tanks.

The toll on Iraqis appeared to have been severe, and senior Iraqi officials at the Palestine Hotel were seen clutching each other with tears rolling down their faces, whether for concern about their personal safety or about the pounding being taken by Iraqi forces could not be known. That pounding includes a devastating assault Monday that targeted Saddam Hussein and his two sons at a large residential compound in the Mansour district.

[International aid agencies warned today that medical supplies in Baghdad were critically low and hospitals were overburdened with wounded.

["They have reached the limit of their capacity," Nada Doumani, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said in Geneva.

At the height of the battle in the presidential compound, Iraqi television devoted its broadcasts through this morning to old film of Mr. Hussein being greeted by an adoring crowd accompanied by choirs singing praises to him and his sons, routine fare for Baghdad TV, and thus no firm indicator of whether the leader had survived.

The TV went off the air in the late morning after American troops pushed out of the presidential compound and made their way up a boulevard about a thousand yards further north, to the area of the Information Ministry and broadcast center.

The battle heightened as American troops reached the point where the compound abuts the Al Jumhiriya bridge, one of three midtown bridges. Bursts of fire escaped from the muzzles of Abrams tanks, and Iraqi defenders fought back with machine gun and rocket fire. American A-10 Thunderbolts — the tank-buster aircraft nicknamed the Warthog — hovered in the dense black smoke above the battle, diving every few minutes and releasing bombs on Iraqi positions.

At about 8:45 a.m., three Abrams tanks moved onto the bridge and advanced about 500 yards toward the eastern bank, halting for three hours at the first bridge support. The tanks could be seen firing shells at Iraqi targets on the bank, including a 10-story building south of the bridge, from which rifle, rocket and machine gun fire had been directed at the tanks.

Resistance from the building appeared to subside after the Americans fired about a dozen shells. The tanks later turned their barrels across the river and to the south, in the direction of Iraqi targets a mile or more away.

At this point reporters in the Sheraton Hotel adjacent to the Palestine could see an intensive battle raging along Al Rashid military airfield about five miles away; that apparently was the point of the furthest advance of American marines, who crossed a tributary of the Tigris on Monday.

It was in the early afternoon when a shell evidently struck the Palestine Hotel, destroying a room on the 15th floor on the east side with a view to the battle that was raging across the river at the presidential compound.

The wounded were carried out of the hotel and taken by car to Iraqi hospital.

Gen. Buford Blount, commander of the United States Army Third Infantry Division, was quoted on the Reuters news agency shortly after the incident saying that an American tank had fired a single round at the hotel.

"The tank was receiving small arms fire and RPG fire from the hotel and engaged the target with one tank round," the general said, referring to rocket-propelled grenades.

In the hours before the strike, Iraqi fighters had taken positions in buildings adjacent to the Palestine and Sheraton hotels to fire against the Americans.

The attack led to scenes of near panic inside the Palestine Hotel, with journalists rushing down darkened stairwells to the hotel forecourt, many in flak jackets and helmets.

Some senior Iraqi officials appeared to have abandoned the hotel where they took up residence during the first 20 days of the war in an apparent attempt to find safety for themselves in a building they assumed would be immune from bombing and ground fire. Journalists tempted to leave the immediate area were ordered to remain.

Despite the ferocious fighting, some elements of normal daily life continued. Taxis painted their regulation orange and white could be seen cruising for fares, and a horse-drawn dray moved slowly down the street behind the Palestine Hotel delivering water supplies to homes and businesses.

People could be seen clustering under building eaves, seeking protection from the battle, while others dashed across the street, glancing to the battles in the north. By lunchtime, as the battle subsided, government workers appeared to check through the neighborhood for damage.

BAGHDAD

Capital Has Look of a Battlefield

By JOHN F. BURNS

AGHDAD, Iraq, Tuesday, April 8 — Gunfire erupted on the grounds of the Republican Palace early this morning, almost 24 hours after an American tank column entered the compound, which has been repeatedly bombed by allied planes since the war began. The explosions shook awake residents of a city that has now come to resemble a battlefield, with Iraqi special forces and militiamen taking up position on crucial streets and bridges.

Low flying aircraft bombed targets around the north end of the presidential compound and near the Planning Ministry. An enormous amount of gunfire — artillery, mortars and machine guns — thundered over the city in a ceaseless cacophony that began at first light.

The battle appeared to be for the area to the north of the site that American forces took on Monday.

There was fierce resistance by Iraqis whop were making attempts at a counterattack, with some of the fighting taking place inside the presidential compound itself.

The American units seemed to be making forays from the compound and taking control of areas farther around it and to the north, the heart of the Iraqi government area.

The Iraqis blocked three bridges across Tigris River from the eastern side with large concrete blocks and dump trucks, moving antiaircraft and artillery weapons on their side of the bridges. The area immediately around the Palestine Hotel was being used as firing positions, with the Iraqi forces apparently betting that they would receive no return fire because most foreign journalists still in the capital live there.

In the exchange the skies filled with the smoke of multiple rocket launchers, artillery and antiaircraft fire.

The battle for the center of government's quarter of Baghdad followed a battle through the night in the heart of the presidential compound. American officers at the international airport said that the relentless fighting included waves of suicide bombers, and that 600 Iraqis had died inside the presidential compound alone.

A tank battle was under way at the north end of the presidential compound near the Jumhuriya Bridge on the west back of the river, extending a mile to the north. The white smoke of American tank fire responding to the Iraqi machine guns and rifles came within 600 yards of Information Ministry.

About 9:30, two M1A1 Abrams tanks moved eastward across the Jumhuriya Bridge at the north end of the presidential compound until they had a clear line of sight and then fired several rounds at Iraq positions at the foot of bridge. The move by the tanks, enveloped with white smoke from their volleys, appeared to be the sign that American forces intended to advance to a crowded residential neighborhood on the east bank of the river.

At the same time, an intensive tank and infantry battle continued behind the tanks and appeared to be centered on a struggle for control of an area that included the Information Ministry and the main radio and television headquarters.

A-10 Warthog tank-buster jets circled the sky above the battle, diving every now and then through the thick black smoke to drop ordnance, each bomb exploding with a burst of fire and black smoke. As the battle wore on, Iraqi resistance appeared to be diminishing.

Shortly after the mortar fire and other explosions around 4:50 a.m., a fire burned in the palace compound on the west bank of the Tigris. American troops and tanks from the Third Infantry Division had rumbled in there on Monday morning as more than 1,000 marines battled their way across the Diyala River in the southeast of the city. Dozens of Iraqi soldiers were killed Monday in the fighting.

At Al Kindi Hospital, officials said at least 75 civilians were brought in on Monday with various injuries.

Iraqi forces defending the city center from the east bank of the Tigris fired back at the Americans with artillery and rocket-propelled grenades, but as night fell on Monday, some American troops remained in the bombed palaces in the compound, the Iraqi equivalent of the White House, which once symbolized President Saddam Hussein's absolute power.

At least nine people died, Iraqi officials said, in an attack that left a deep crater in the upscale Mansur neighborhood of the city.

In Washington, American officials said hours later that they had tried to kill Mr. Hussein in a strike on the same neighborhood. There was no indication here that Mr. Hussein or any member of his family had suffered.

In clear view across the river from the Palestine Hotel, two American Abrams tanks idled on the embankment Monday morning at the point where the sprawling palace grounds meet a bend in the Tigris.

A squad of American infantrymen in light brown camouflage uniforms, with flak jackets and combat rifles, scoured the cluster of date palms between the palaces and the water.

BAGHDAD

Capital Has Look of a Battlefield

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At one moment a group of about 20 Iraqi soldiers could be seen scurrying away from the tanks, up the riverbank to the north, only one of them carrying a rifle and several wearing nothing but boxer shorts.

Reaching a slipway guarded on their approach by a fence running down into the water, some of the men plunged into the river and began swimming upstream. The Americans opened fire, throwing cascades of water into the air but not, apparently, striking any of the men.

A minute or two later, huts along the sandspit near the Americans exploded into infernos, followed by the pop-pop of exploding munitions.

The scene seemed to illustrate the plight of Mr. Hussein's government, whose army has mustered little effective resistance in the capital despite much oratory about the grim fate awaiting American soldiers. That official defiance continued despite the Americans' increasingly incontrovertible presence.

On the eastern bank of the Tigris, a semblance of normality persisted. Cafes were still thronged with people and street vendors did their trade. But passage across the river was tightly controlled by militiamen.

Most of the city has been without electricity and water for a week. Working telephone lines are scarce. Long lines formed Monday outside the offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross as people waited to place international calls. Bus stations were full of people trying to leave, but buses were scarce.

As for the government, it showed no sign of wavering. Less than two hours after the American incursion began, the Iraqi information minister, Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, was at the television networks' "stand-up" positions on the second-story roof of the Palestine Hotel's conference center, to insist that the reporters had not seen what they thought.

If reporters believed that they had witnessed an American drive deep into the heart of the capital, Mr. Sahhaf, in the green uniform and black beret of the ruling Baath Party, wished to disabuse them.

He implied that they, and American military commanders, were hallucinating about the tanks.

"They are really sick in their minds," he said. "They said they entered with 65 tanks into the center of the capital. I inform you that this is too far from the reality. This story is part of their sickness. The real truth is that there was no entry of American or British troops into Baghdad at all." The truth, he said, was that the Americans had pushed only a short distance out of the airport into a suburb where they had been surrounded by Iraqi troops, with "three-quarters of them slaughtered."

American television images of soldiers surrounded by the marbled sumptuousness of Mr. Hussein's palace, Mr. Sahhaf said, were shot in "the reception hall" of the airport. "They are just cheap liars!" he said.

To that, Mr. Sahhaf added a genial word of advice for reporters. "Just make sure to be accurate," he said. "Don't repeat their lies. Otherwise you will play a marketing role for the Americans."

Sound of Guns Heralds Ground War in Baghdad

By JOHN F. BURNS

AGHDAD, Iraq, April 6 — After being subjected to two weeks of relentless bombing that has destroyed many of the power centers of President Saddam Hussein's government, the Iraqi capital found itself today deep into the ground battle that promises to be the decisive phase of America's war to topple the Iraqi leader.

From the heart of the capital, a new cacophony of battle signaled the shift from a war fought primarily from the air to one where the outcome will depend increasingly on American ground troops.

The earth-shaking devastation of bombs and missiles was mostly stilled today, overtaken by the more distant sounds of artillery and rocket fire, by the staccato of machine-gun and rifle bursts, and by the scream of American jets flying what appeared to be low-level ground support missions.

Most of the fighting appeared to be concentrated away to the southwest of the city, in the area of what, until its capture by American troops on Friday, was Saddam International Airport.

Now symbolically stripped of the Iraqi leader's name by the Americans, the airport has become a magnetic point on the personal compass of almost everybody in this city of 4.5 million people, whether the hard core of loyalists to Mr. Hussein or the increasingly venturous Iraqis, numerous if not yet demonstrably a majority, who have begun to shake off decades of fear and to whisper hauntingly that they wait anxiously for the end.

The government has up to now held to its official line, even since the capture of the airport three days ago: the Americans, the information minister has repeated with a cherubic air at daily news conferences, have fallen into the Iraqi trap by advancing to the gates of the city.

But for those listening for shifts, for the minor notes that rise even as the major ones pound out the familiar theme, there have been hints of a wavering certainty.

Today, the minister, Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, was no longer contending, as he did on Saturday, that the Americans had been routed from the airport by an Iraqi counterattack, and divided into isolated pockets where they were surrendering en masse. Instead, he told a news conference, the Republican Guards were "tightening the noose around the U.S. enemy in the area surrounding the airport," having killed 50 American soldiers and destroyed six American tanks.

That appeared to be a subtle but important shift, an acknowledgment that American forces really are close by and ready to fight. As for the citizens of Baghdad, the question being posed by many is this: when will American tanks and infantry try to storm the city, not as they did for a few hours early Saturday, but in earnest, with intent to seize the city's heart, to haul down the Iraqi flag that still flutters atop the Republican Palace.

To Mr. Hussein's die-hard supporters, the very notion that the Iraqi ruler's days might be numbered remains unthinkable, or at least inadmissible. But today the information minister's talk of the "scoundrels" and "villains" and "criminals" who have invaded Iraq was in a lesser key, subordinated to more pressing, more practical concerns. Iraqis, he said, should be on the lookout everywhere for the enemy, and "should not ignore" sightings of American units, or fail to report them to the Iraqi military.

From the official Iraqi standpoint, Mr. Sahhaf has made himself the media star of the war, if anybody other than Mr. Hussein would dare claim that distinction for himself.

A sort of Iraqi Donald H. Rumsfeld with the rhetorical flourishes of Soviet-era Moscow, he likes to muse on stage, developing his thrusts, amusing himself with his caustic wit at the Americans' expense.

But he was in a distinctly more sober mood today. In a statement read on state television, he said Iraqis should not be prey to "rumors," especially of a kind that suggested that American forces were gaining the upper hand.

The allies, he said, "might attempt to release rumors, believing that they can cause confusion, and tell lies, asserting that there is a landing here and there."

Sound of Guns Heralds Ground War in Baghdad

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At about the time that statement was being broadcast, Iraqis who had filled up at a Baghdad gas station were reporting that drivers arriving from points west and northwest of the city were telling of seeing American paratroopers descending from the sky alongside the access roads that American commanders, in Qatar, were saying they were seizing so as to tighten the encirclement of Baghdad. There was no way of knowing if those sightings were merely the work of the imaginations of the drivers.

Mr. Sahhaf had other words of advice, and warning. Iraqi fighters, he said, should refrain from firing their guns in Baghdad "for no reason," as many appear to have done through the prolonged heavy bombing, conducted from an altitude that made the endless rattle of antiaircraft guns and automatic rifle seem more like a reaffirmation of vulnerability than an act of meaningful defense.

But if that sounded like an appeal for conserving ammunition, there was an intriguing, slightly menacing, counterpoint. With the enemy in Baghdad, he said, it was the duty now for "anybody who wants to do so to use his weapon," and anybody who failed to do so would be considered "cursed." Violators, he said, would not be treated leniently.

Later in the day, Mr. Hussein himself weighed in, in the form of a message to Iraqi fighters read on television. The smiling Iraqi leader was shown in his field marshal's uniform presiding at a meeting with senior officials that was said to have taken place today.

In a film broadcast on Friday that showed Mr. Hussein, or a double, strolling about some of Baghdad's western neighborhoods, the message was of a leader on top of his game, full of beaming, hand-slapping, climb-on-the-car-hood geniality.

But the statement read on his behalf today suggested an awareness that the Iraqi Army was not getting its job done. First, the statement said that anybody who destroyed an allied tank, armored personnel carrier or artillery gun would be awarded 15 million Iraqi dinars, about $5,000. Second, any Iraqi fighter losing touch with his unit during battle "let him join a unit of the same kind that he is able to join."

To some Iraqis, that sounded like a warning against giving up when units are decimated by American firepower, as American commanders have reported Iraqi soldiers and paramilitaries doing in droves. Reporters traveling with American units pushing north to Baghdad have described roadsides littered with abandoned combat boots and uniforms, and large numbers of young men in civilian clothes waving white strips of cloth.

In the effort to show Iraqi defenses as holding, and even prevailing, the Information Ministry organized a press tour of a sole, burned-out American M1A1 Abrams tank that had been abandoned on an expressway during the probing reconnaissance that a unit of the Third Infantry Division conducted on Saturday.

The tank, presumably, was one of the six that Mr. Sahhaf claimed as trophies of Iraq's counterattack on the American forces near the airport. An Iraqi officer, Brig. Muhammad Jassim, told reporters that the tank was one of five American tanks destroyed in the battle, the other four having been towed away by the Iraqis to make way for traffic.

The American account acknowledged the loss of one tank.

The Iraqis at the site of the abandoned tank gave another version, one that made the American probe not so much a tour de force as a debacle. Senior army officers joined with officials of the ruling Baath Party in clambering atop the tank and chanting devotions to Mr. Hussein.

"God is great, and to him we owe thanks," someone had scribbled in Arabic on the blackened hulk. Soldiers were produced to describe the withering fire that had been trained on the Americans, and to affirm that all Iraqis were ready to die for their leader.

The lone tank hardly made the triumphal point Iraqi officials intended, especially when Western newsmen were conducted to the scene along a highway littered with the tangled, burned-out wreckage of at least 30 Iraqi tanks, armored carriers, army trucks, artillery guns and pick-up trucks of the kind favored by the Fedayeen Saddam.

What the tour also showed was that large areas of Baghdad are being turned into a military camp. Tanks, armored cars and artillery guns could be seen posted near bridges, in civilian neighborhoods and alongside the expressways, at places where no major defenses were visible only days ago. Soldiers and paramilitaries were visible digging bunkers. Some flashed victory signs at the Westerners as they drove by.

Defiant Iraqis Say U.S. Advance Has Been Broken

By JOHN F. BURNS

AGHDAD, Iraq, April 5 — Senior Iraqi officials remained defiant today in the face of American military might, asserting that Iraqi soldiers and suicide bombers had "crushed" American troops at Baghdad's international airport and broken the American advance on the capital into isolated pockets that were surrendering to relentless Iraqi attacks.

On a day when American commanders sent advance units probing within miles of central Baghdad, the official Iraqi response was mocking and triumphalist, much as it has been throughout the 17 days of war.

To Westerners here who have kept abreast of the military situation by satellite telephone links to the outside world, the situation appeared to confirm, ever more strongly, that the rigidities of the system built by Saddam Hussein have become a debilitating handicap to Iraq's ability to confront American power. After years of unquestioning fealty, senior Iraqi officials seemed unwilling to provide any interpretation of military events that might prejudice Mr. Hussein's claim to be the embodiment of Iraq's invincibility.

Nothing seemed to demonstrate this more clearly than the events that shook the capital this morning. Not long after dawn, Iraqis venturing into southwestern Baghdad toward the international airport returned to the east side of the Tigris River to report having seen American tanks a few miles from the palaces and ministries in the city center that have been the most visible symbols of Mr. Hussein's dominance. They began speaking as if the day might end with the government's collapse and the Stars and Stripes flying over the capital.

That this response was not peculiar to Iraqis favoring Mr. Hussein's fall was apparent from the sudden frantic stirrings in the streets around the Palestine Hotel, quarters for the foreign journalists sequestered by the government on the Tigris's eastern bank. Cars driven by loyalists of the governing Baath Party began touring the neighborhood with loudspeakers proclaiming Mr. Hussein's glories and Iraqis' resolve to fight Americans to the death.

Simultaneously, a cavalcade of police cars, sirens wailing, set out on a demonstration of their own, as if to remind any waverers that Mr. Hussein remained the decisive force in the neighborhood.

By sunset, the excitement had subsided. It became clear that the probing advances by the American forces had been, mostly, just that — thrusts into the city, as an American military spokesman at the Central Command headquarters in Qatar said, intended to shake Iraqi confidence without yet making a challenge for outright control.

The thrusts, Maj. Gen. Victor Renuart said, according to a Reuters report, were intended to "demonstrate to the Iraqi leadership that they do not have control in the way they continue to say on their television."

But if this was the American strategy, it was far removed from the Iraqi construction of the day's realities. Information Minister Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf made his regular daily foray to the Palestine Hotel to put things into perspective, Iraqi style. His main point was that the American capture of the airport on Friday had been reversed by an Iraqi counterattack using regular units and "a very innovative way of war" involving suicide bombers.

General Renuart, in Qatar, said today that the Americans remained in firm control of the airport and that they would continue moving into Baghdad as and when they chose.

But Mr. Sahhaf said, essentially, that the Americans were in the world of make-believe.

"We have defeated them, in fact we have crushed them in the place of Saddam International Airport," he said. "We have pushed them outside the whole area of the airport."

To drive home this claim of American desperation, he added this account of the battle: "They have done everything crazy, everything crazy, in order to lessen the pressure we have put on their troops."

The Iraqi strategy, Mr. Sahhaf said, was to drive the Americans back to pockets of resistance outside Baghdad. One place mentioned was Abu Ghraib, west of the capital, notorious as the site of the grimmest prison in Mr. Hussein's gulag.

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Travelers reaching Baghdad in recent days described American troops with tanks at checkpoints on the expressway that passes Abu Ghraib on the way to Jordan. But Mr. Sahhaf said that the American units there, and at two other locations he named as Hadithi and Qadisiya, were surrounded by Iraqi troops.

"We nailed them down," he said.

These expressions of bravado appeared to have been reinforced by film shown on television on Friday and again today of a man identified as Mr. Hussein visiting neighborhoods in western Baghdad and being greeted with jubilation by ordinary citizens. Iraqis who saw the broadcast said they had no doubt that the man was indeed Mr. Hussein, not a double.

While questions lingered, including when the video was made, the effect on Mr. Hussein's most zealous loyalists was beyond doubt. At the Palestine Hotel, the mood among Iraqi officials brightened.

For two weeks, they had pointed to the nightly television broadcasts of Mr. Hussein meeting senior officials as proof that he was still in command. But perhaps they, like officials in Washington, had begun to doubt whether these scenes were new or recycled from the past.

Now, with the Iraqi leader's appearance on the streets, they seemed to rediscover the confidence shaken when the war began on March 20 with a cruise missile strike aimed at a meeting in Baghdad of senior officials who, the Pentagon said, might have included Mr. Hussein.

Oddly, the political flourish involved in the Iraqi leader's televised walkabout was followed today by a reversion to one of the expedients that had led American intelligence analysts — and many Iraqis — to conclude that Mr. Hussein might have been killed or incapacitated by the missile strike. This afternoon, Mr. Sahhaf was back on television reading a message from Mr. Hussein, without any explanation as to why the leader could not have delivered the message himself.

The message made no reference to the American seizure of the airport or the Iraqi counterattack that followed, curious perhaps given that most television viewers — a small minority, because Baghdad has been without electricity for 48 hours — must have known of the fighting on the city's southern rim.

Mr. Hussein's statement was economical in his references to the fighting, saying only that the "invaders" were concentrating on Baghdad but weakening elsewhere.

"The criminals will be humiliated," he said.

Later, scenes of Mr. Hussein presiding over a gathering of top aides were broadcast, but it was unclear when or where the meeting took place.

Twice today, the Information Ministry took reporters on a tour of the city's western districts where the American thrusts had been reported around dawn. The Iraqis seemed particularly keen to show that the district of Yarmouk, about five miles from the airport, remained under Iraqi control. Reporters who saw the Yarmouk hospital this afternoon reported no sign of American troops, or of any battle in the area.

But there were other signs that something had happened in the area, and that the Iraqis were not eager for it to be known. An American photographer who reached the hospital this morning described large numbers of Iraqi casualties arriving on stretchers. When the busload of reporters arrived hours later, they were told the visit to the hospital was canceled, without explanation.

What the bus tours did show was that defenses in the city center had been strengthened. Today, tanks and artillery were positioned beside tall buildings or in parks. Soldiers could be seen digging bunkers.

Just about everywhere, families were busy loading up cars with possessions, mostly food and clothing. But the question on almost every Iraqi's lips when meeting Westerners was the one that nobody could answer: How long before the Americans push into the city to stay? How long before this war will be over?

Defiant Iraqis Say U.S. Advance Has Been Broken

By JOHN F. BURNS

AGHDAD, Iraq, April 5 - Senior Iraqi officials remained defiant today in the face of American military might, asserting that Iraqi soldiers and suicide bombers had ``crushed'' American troops at Baghdad's international airport and broken the American advance on the capital into isolated pockets that were surrendering to relentless Iraqi attacks.

On a day when American commanders sent advance units probing within miles of central Baghdad, the official Iraqi response was mocking and triumphalist, much as it has been throughout the 17 days of war.

To Westerners here who have kept abreast of the military situation by satellite telephone links to the outside world, the situation appeared to confirm, ever more strongly, that the rigidities of the system built by Saddam Hussein have become a debilitating handicap to Iraq's ability to confront American power. After years of unquestioning fealty, senior Iraqi officials seemed unwilling to provide any interpretation of military events that might prejudice Mr. Hussein's claim to invincibility.

Nothing seemed to demonstrate this more clearly than the events that shook central Baghdad this morning. Not long after dawn, Iraqis venturing into southwestern Baghdad toward the international airport returned to the east side of the Tigris River to report having seen American tanks in neighborhoods just four or five miles from the palaces and ministries in the city center that have been the most visible symbols of Mr. Hussein's dominance. They began speaking as if the day might end with the government's collapse and the Stars and Stripes flying over the capital.

That this response was not peculiar to Iraqis favoring Mr. Hussein's fall was apparent from the sudden stirrings in the streets around the Palestine Hotel, quarters for the foreign journalists sequestered by the government. Cars driven by loyalists of the governing Baath Party began touring the neighborhood with loudspeakers proclaiming Mr. Hussein's glories and Iraqis' resolve to fight Americans to the death.

Simultaneously, a cavalcade of police cars, sirens wailing, set out on a demonstration of their own, as if to remind any waverers that Mr. Hussein remained the decisive force in the neighborhood.

By sunset, the mood of anticipation - or alarm, depending on the Iraqis involved - had subsided. It became clear that the probing advances by the American forces had been, mostly, just that - thrusts into the city, as an American military spokesman at the Central Command headquarters in Qatar said, intended to shake Iraqi confidence without yet making a challenge for outright control.

The thrusts, Maj. Gen. Victor Renuart said, according to a Reuters report, were intended to ``demonstrate to the Iraqi leadership that they do not have control in the way they continue to say on their television.''

But if this was the American strategy, it was far removed from the Iraqi construction of the day's realities. Information Minister Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf made his regular daily foray to the Palestine Hotel to put things into perspective, Iraqi style. His main point was that the American capture of the airport on Friday had been reversed by an Iraqi counterattack using regular units and ``a very innovative way of war'' involving suicide bombers.

General Renuart, in Qatar, said today that the Americans remained in firm control of the airport, and that they would continue moving into Baghdad as and when they chose.

But Mr. Sahhaf said, essentially, that the Americans were in the world of make-believe.

``We have defeated them, in fact we have crushed them in the place of Saddam International Airport,'' he said today. ``We have pushed them outside the whole area of the airport.''

To drive home this claim of American desperation, he added this account of the battle: ``They have done everything crazy, everything crazy, in order to lessen the pressure we have put on their troops.''

The Iraqi strategy, Mr. Sahhaf said, was to drive the Americans back to pockets of resistance outside Baghdad. One place mentioned was Abu Ghraib, west of the capital, notorious as the site of the grimmest prison in Mr. Hussein's gulag.

Defiant Iraqis Say U.S. Advance Has Been Broken

(Page 2 of 2)

Travelers reaching Baghdad in recent days described American troops with tanks at checkpoints on the expressway that passes Abu Ghraib on the way to Jordan. But Mr. Sahhaf said that the American units there, and at two other locations he named as Hadithi and Qadisiya, were surrounded by Iraqi troops.

``We nailed them down,'' he said.

These expressions of bravado appeared to have been reinforced by several broadcasts on Iraqi state television. Today Mr. Hussein was shown on videotape meeting with his sons, Uday and Qusay, and top aides and military commanders, according to Reuters. Iraqi television said the videotape had been made today, but there was no way to confirm that.

On Friday and again today, film of a man identified as Mr. Hussein visiting neighborhoods in western Baghdad and being greeted with jubilation by Iraqis was televised. Iraqis who saw the broadcast said they had no doubt that the man was indeed Mr. Hussein and not a double.

While questions lingered, including when the video was made, the effect on Mr. Hussein's most zealous loyalists was beyond doubt. At the Palestine Hotel, the mood among Iraqi officials brightened.

For two weeks, they had pointed to the nightly television broadcasts of Mr. Hussein meeting senior officials as proof that he was still in command. But perhaps they, like officials in Washington, had begun to doubt whether these scenes were new or recycled from the past.

Now, with the Iraqi leader's appearance on the streets, they seemed to rediscover the confidence shaken when the war began on March 20 with a cruise missile strike aimed at a meeting in Baghdad of senior officials who, the Pentagon said, might have included Mr. Hussein.

Oddly, the political flourish involved in the Iraqi leader's televised walkabout was followed today by a reversion to one of the expedients that had led American intelligence analysts - and many Iraqis - to conclude that Mr. Hussein might have been killed or incapacitated by the missile strike. This afternoon, Mr. Sahhaf was back on television reading a message from Mr. Hussein, without any explanation as to why the leader could not have delivered the message himself.

The message made no reference to the American seizure of the airport or the Iraqi counterattack that followed, curious perhaps given that most television viewers - a small minority, because Baghdad has been without electricity for 48 hours - must have known of the fighting on the city's southern rim.

Mr. Hussein's statement was economical in his references to the fighting, saying only that the ``invaders'' were concentrating on Baghdad but weakening elsewhere.

``To hurt the enemy more, raise the level of your attacks,'' he told Iraqi fighters. ``The criminals will be humiliated.''

Twice today, the Information Ministry took reporters on a tour of the city's western districts where the American thrusts had been reported around dawn. The Iraqis seemed particularly keen to show that the district of Yarmouk, about five miles from the airport, remained under Iraqi control. Reporters who saw the Yarmouk hospital this afternoon reported no sign of American troops, or of any battle in the area.

But there were other signs that something had happened in the area, and that the Iraqis were not eager for it to be known. An American photographer who reached the hospital this morning described large numbers of Iraqi casualties arriving on stretchers. When the busload of reporters arrived hours later, they were told the visit to the hospital was canceled, without explanation.

What the bus tours did show was that defenses in the city center had been strengthened. Today, tanks and artillery guns were positioned beside tall buildings, or in parks. Soldiers could be seen digging bunkers.

Just about everywhere, families were busy loading up cars with possessions, mostly food and clothing. But the question on almost every Iraqi's lips when meeting Westerners was the one that nobody could answer: How long before the Americans push into the city to stay? How long before this war, with its declared objective of toppling Mr. Hussein, will be over?

Iraqi TV Presents a Relaxed Hussein

By JOHN F. BURNS

AGHDAD, Iraq, April 4 — With American troops moving cautiously toward placing the city under siege, Iraqi television tonight showed a 12-minute film of a relaxed and cheerful man it said was Saddam Hussein strolling with apparent nonchalance around Baghdad and stopping to exchange greetings with ordinary Iraqis.

The film, shown several times during the evening, appeared to be Iraq's riposte to conjecture among officials in Washington that the 65-year-old ruler might have been killed or incapacitated in the opening American missile strikes of the war, 16 days ago. The man shown looked like a champion returning to neighborhoods where he has been most loved.

The Pentagon had said that the war's opening salvos on March 20 were aimed at a meeting of top Iraqi leaders in a military compound in southern Baghdad that intelligence had indicated might have included Mr. Hussein and possibly his two sons, Uday and Qusay.

Today, at what appeared to be a critical juncture of the war, with American troops occupying the airport just to the west of the city, Iraq produced what amounted to a coup de théâtre, one that put Mr. Hussein back on the public stage in a way that sought to puncture the notion that he and his associates were on the ropes.

Whatever the impression the film made in Washington, most people here believed it was Saddam Hussein, alive, well and garrulous. It was him, down to his loping walk, his thick, almost lisping Arabic with the accent of his native district of Tikrit, and the thick mustache now graying.

The message conveyed, people here said, was as powerful as any the Iraqi leader has contrived in a long time — at least for those Iraqis who saw it, a dwindling number in Baghdad, where the power went out across the city just as a new wave of heavy American air attacks began on Thursday night.

With Baghdad plunged into darkness, and American artillery audible in the city, the increased tension in the capital stood in marked contrast to the casual air affected by the Iraqi leader in the film, if it was indeed him.

A few hours before the broadcast, state television also showed images of Mr. Hussein with a new speech from what appeared to be the same low-ceilinged bunker he used before, sitting at the same lectern and beside the same Iraqi flag as he did on March 24. This time, he urged Iraqis to fight against the growing encirclement of Baghdad.

"Strike them with the power of faith wherever they approach you, and resist them, O courageous citizens of Baghdad," Mr. Hussein said. "With the grace of God, you will be the victors, and they will be the vanquished. Our martyrs will go to paradise, and their dead will go to hell."

Leafing through a text roughly handwritten on a fold-over notepad, he made no mention of the capture of the airport.

But his remarks appeared to have been drafted in the light of the sudden change in the military map that had occurred in the past 48 hours, with the American Third Infantry Division and the Marines' First Division driving rapidly north from the southwest and southeast into the outer reaches of the city.

"The enemy has evaded the defenses of our armed forces around Baghdad and other cities and has progressed, as we expected, to some landings here and there," the Iraqi leader said. Belittling this, he said, "In most cases, these landings have been made on the highways and involve a small number of troops that you can confront and destroy with the arms that you have."

Few films, if any, seem certain to receive closer scrutiny than the one showing Mr. Hussein in the streets of Baghdad. But the provisional answers to the questions it posed that were given tonight by Iraqis friendly enough to Western reporters to speak candidly about Mr. Hussein — and to whisper that they yearned for an Iraq without him — offered little comfort to American war planners.

The man was Mr. Hussein, they insisted. That was the Iraqi leader's slight paunch visible when the man in the film turned sideways to the camera as he accepted the cheers of the crowd. That was his gesture — chopping the air with his right hand, palm clenched, thumb upward, just as Mr. Hussein is shown doing in a battalion of statues around Baghdad.

As for the dating of the film, it seemed unarguable that it was shot after the start of the war.

Iraqi TV Presents a Relaxed Hussein

(Page 2 of 2)

The black smoke that has plumed skyward over Baghdad since March 22, when trenches filled with a heavy oil were first lit in an attempt to blind American pilots and the guidance systems of bombs and missiles, was clearly visible on the horizon.

The black car carrying Mr. Hussein, apparently a luxury Mercedes or one of its Japanese equivalents, was shown driving past streets of shuttered shops, some with their windows taped, a step almost no Iraqis took until the war began.

Other glimpses of street life resembled what Western reporters have seen during the war: men fanning open air spits at restaurants still offering kebabs, and traffic much diminished but still busy enough, with double-decker buses and battered white-and-orange taxis and crowded minivans.

At least one place where he stopped was easy to identify: across the street from an auction house in the Mansour district where many Iraqis have gone to sell their furniture and household appliances in recent years to stave off penury as the economy collapsed under the weight of Mr. Hussein's wars and international sanctions.

This placed the Iraqi leader — if it was him — at least halfway to the airport from the largest of his vast compounds in Baghdad, the now almost-obliterated Republican Palace grounds. The weather, too, was a clue — overcast, just as it was in Baghdad today, and a sharp break from Thursday, when clear blue skies aided American attacks that were among the heaviest of the war.

All in all, Iraqis friendly to Americans concluded, this was almost certainly Mr. Hussein, and the day he was filmed most probably today.

For years, Mr. Hussein has limited his public appearances to rare moments atop the reviewing stand at Army Day parades and other portentous events. When he has been seen moving among ordinary Iraqis, it has been on old film, endlessly recycled on television, showing him being enveloped by adoring, chanting crowds. The more these films have been shown, the more many ordinary Iraqis have seen them as the obverse of the essential truth, that Mr. Hussein is an isolated, secretive, cruel leader. Against this sense of the Iraqi president, today's film was astonishing.

A handful of security men could be seen around Mr. Hussein, but nothing like the layers of steely eyed men described by the few foreigners who have met him in his palaces.

Principally, his security seemed to be left to two bulky men in sports shirts carrying Kalashnikov rifles, and their concern appeared to be to keep a way clear for Mr. Hussein as he moved forward to greet people, not to watch for potential assassins.

At one point, a small, curly haired boy of about 2 was thrust into his arms. Like any politician on the hustings, Mr. Hussein held the boy up, beaming.

Beside Mr. Hussein, throughout, were two senior-looking officials in the green uniforms that are the common dress among military men and officials of the ruling Baath Party. Aside from them, there was no obvious sign of the Baath Party officials who normally lurk among the crowds to orchestrate adulation for the leader.

Film shot from what appeared to be the front passenger seat of the Iraqi leader's car gave glimpses of the heart-stopping moments other drivers must have had as his car drove by, assuming the drivers knew who he was.

At one point, as the car crossed a bridge over an expressway and pulled to the right to make an off-ramp, it pulled past a battered taxi that could have been a totem for the humiliations that have befallen ordinary people in Mr. Hussein's Iraq.

But it was triumph rather than humiliation that the government sought to project today.

The information minister, Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, positively chirped as he laid out the Iraqi version of events at the Palestine Hotel, quarters for all foreign reporters covering the war.

He said American advances in a broad crescent across Baghdad's southern approaches were all part of an Iraqi plan to lure the Americans into a catastrophic defeat at the gates of Baghdad.

The minister said Iraqi forces had battled the Americans at every point of their advance, inflicting "heavy injuries and killings" and destroying large numbers of tanks and other vehicles.

The airport, he said, will be "the Americans' graveyard now."

A CAPITAL'S PLIGHT

Both the New and Routinely Old Shape Daily Life in Baghdad

By JOHN F. BURNS

AGHDAD, Iraq, April 3 — For one motorcycle patrolman here today, it seemed to matter little that columns of American troops were nearing the capital, or that the drivers still on the roads might have reasons to hasten in a city under heavy bombing, or even that the government whose laws he enforces might not be quite so solid as its ceaseless announcements of battlefield triumphs have implied.

Idling on the embankment beside the Tigris on a perfect spring day, the leather-jacketed patrolman spotted a car careering though a red light, and gave chase.

From an 11th-floor balcony of the Palestine Hotel, it was not possible to hear what the driver of the red Mercedes said when he was pulled over halfway down the block, but his gestures conveyed the essence powerfully enough. "Get real," the driver seemed to be saying. "Look at the sky. Look across the river. The old is giving way to the new."

Across the river, in plain view not 1,000 yards away, lay Saddam Hussein's principal palace complex, and within it the burned-out, blackened ruins of the old seats of power. Above, through much of the day, were the vapor trails of American bombers. Some were visible through field glasses as B-52's that arrowed in needle-straight from the northwest.

Untroubled by antiaircraft fire, they curved southward toward the front lines where American troops were pushing through the battered lines of the Republican Guard, or banked to the east to home in on targets in the heart of Baghdad.

Since the war began two weeks ago, the people of Baghdad have been exposed to a reality so stark, so astonishing, so overwhelming, that those who have witnessed it have struggled to find words adequate to express what they have seen.

To have been in Berlin or Dresden or Hamburg in the last months of World War II would surely have been more ghastly, for the sheer numbers of casualties caused by the Allies' bombing.

But American air power, as the 21st century begins, is a terrible swift sword that strikes with a suddenness, a devastation and a precision, in most cases, that moves even agnostics to reach for words associated with the power of gods.

Along with this, life under the bombing has continued to roll forward with an everyday nonchalance that, in its own way, has been as hard to adjust to as the bombing.

On the same street where the driver was pulled over this morning, a man who owns a boutique selling expensive perfumes to the Iraqi elite — a man dependent on the custom of people grown rich and powerful under the nearly 24-year-old rule of Mr. Hussein, and thus a man whose fortunes could be about to tank — was busy washing his open-top Japanese jeep, with red flashes on the side to mark him as a man with zip. Car washed, he took the hose to the plants flanking his boutique's doorway.

If there was any doubt that Iraqis in the neighborhood had some idea of what was going on just beyond the horizon, it disappeared at another sight on the same street, of policemen at a precinct house gathering on the sidewalk, six or seven at a time, to gaze down the Tigris past the point where the muddy green river turns from its southbound course through the city's heart to curve southwest.

For days, those gazing across the river have been measuring the devastation wrought by the bombing on the Republican Palace compound that is enfolded by the river's curve, but today the policemen's arms were pointing past the palace grounds, down the river, to an invisible point 10 or 20 miles away where the American Third Infantry Division was rapidly moving north.

The officer chasing the motorist, the perfume man washing his car, the policemen standing in the street: All were testaments, in the way they ignored today's bombing raids, to how little threatened, individually, most people in Baghdad seem to have felt by the air attacks.

The news this morning that American troops were nearing Saddam International Airport, 10 miles from the city center to the southwest, and had taken control of the highway leading west to Jordan at Abu Ghraib, 15 miles from the capital's heart, caused many families who had sat out the bombing to leave the city, many to the north where there has been no massed American advance, others to the east toward Iran, some even southward toward the American front lines.

A CAPITAL'S PLIGHT

Both the New and Routinely Old Shape Daily Life in Baghdad

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The fear driving the exodus, by car, bus and truck, was of street-to-street fighting, revenge killings, a last-minute paroxysm of violence by the enforcers of the terror that has bludgeoned Iraq for three decades. For many Iraqis, this has been the nightmare all along, the least calculable part of the "price" they tell Westerners they have known would come with any American invasion to topple Mr. Hussein.

The implication in these whispered conversations has been that there has been a price, in limited casualties, that many, perhaps even most, Iraqis would be prepared to pay for their freedom, but that equally there was a price that would be too high.

With the battle for Baghdad about to be joined, that price will now be set, and with it, an outsider can imagine, the estimate many Iraqis will ultimately make of the war. But many people in Baghdad seem to have made their judgment about the air campaign already.

After the first few days, life in the city's streets gradually began reviving as confidence grew that there was not going to be widespread carnage, with American bombs and missiles striking wildly at civilians. Today, as for many days past, city-center gathering spots like Liberation Square, site of the lamppost hangings of nine Iraqi Jews condemned for spying in 1969, were busy with fruit and vegetable sellers, and hawkers doing brisk trade in the water canisters and buckets, duct tape and canned food, sacks of flour and candles, that have been the biggest sellers in recent weeks.

That American bombs and missiles have gone astray is beyond challenge. Pentagon officials acknowledged before the war that even with the advances in satellite-guided targeting systems since the Persian Gulf war in 1991, no technology was foolproof, and mistakes would be made. How many there have been in this war will be clearer when the fighting ends, but the impression gained from living the war in the center of Baghdad has been that many of the strikes that have been visible — either from the grandstand view afforded by the Palestine Hotel's balconies, or from the guided bus tours of bomb sites around the city organized by Iraqi Information Ministry officials — have been astonishingly accurate.

On visits to neighborhoods around the city, reporters have seen homes, workshops and sidewalks where airstrikes have killed dozens of civilians and wounded many more. In some cases, the huge size of the craters, the proximity to military installations and witnesses' accounts have lent credibility to the Iraqi claims that the strikes were responsible.

In others, including the marketplace bombing that Iraq said killed 62 people in the Shula district of western Baghdad on Friday, there have been more questions than answers. Often, as in Shula, officials have delayed taking reporters to the site for hours, and have met with evasions the inquiries about the unusually small crater at the marketplace, and the fact that most victims appeared to have died from shrapnel wounds and not from the kind of blast associated with high-energy bombs and missiles.

Iraqi officials asserted today that their toll for civilian casualties from all forms of American arms was 677 killed and 5,062 wounded, of whom about one third have been in Baghdad.

The information minister, Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, said at a news conference at noon that the civilian toll from the bombing in the capital in the previous 24 hours alone was 27 dead and 193 wounded. But he gave no incident-by-incident breakdown, and, as has often been the case, Western reporters and photographers dependent on Iraqi permission to visit bombing sites were given no opportunity to judge for themselves.

For many journalists who have witnessed it, the most powerful image of the bombing, apart from visits to sites where significant numbers of Iraqis died, has been of target after target that has been struck with the precision of a sniper's bullet.

Over a few days in the last week, at least six inner-city telephone exchanges were destroyed, apparently to disrupt the Iraqi leadership's ability to conduct the war from the safety of underground bunkers and other hideouts. In almost every case, the missiles or bombs used appeared to have struck bulls-eyes in the roofs, plunging downward into the buildings' hearts before exploding with a force that left nothing but dangling wires, shattered concrete and twisted steel. At two exchanges, hours later, a lone beeper continued to wail in the wreckage, like a bell tolling for the departed.

A CAPITAL'S PLIGHT

Both the New and Routinely Old Shape Daily Life in Baghdad

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But the striking thing, in these cases, was that even Iraqi officials made no claims of deaths. The neighborhoods where the exchanges and other probable targets are situated were mostly abandoned days ahead of the strikes, as were the targets.

The Information Ministry, struck three times by cruise missiles in as many days, emptied out after the Pentagon gave what turned out to be 48 hours' notice that it would be attacked. Iraqi officials said only one man had been wounded.

One destroyed telephone exchange, in the Salhiya district near the Baghdad railway station, was obliterated, with no visible damage apart from debris falling in the garden to the adjacent compound, 100 feet away, that houses the Saddam Center for Cardiac Surgery.

Putting together the American war in Iraq as told by Americans, and Iraq's war with America as told by Iraqis, has been one of the more bizarre aspects of the conflict as experienced from Baghdad.

To hear the Iraqi ministers tell it, American and British forces have suffered defeat after humiliating defeat.

Today, Mr. Sahhaf, the information minister, bounced into the daily briefings, a short, stocky, burnished man in green uniform and black beret, ever ready to rock back with laughter at the felicity of his Soviet-style phrase-making about the "criminals" and "villains" and "mercenaries" and "lackeys" who have invaded Iraq.

Unfailingly courteous, he could almost be called a jolly fellow, save for the pistol he wears at his hip, a reminder that the government he serves has rarely stinted to resort to more persuasive forms of argumentation when discourse has run its course.

By early this afternoon, American reports from the battlefront suggested that Iraqi defenses around Baghdad, as well as at Basra, Nasiriya, Najaf and Kut, were taking a pounding. But Mr. Sahhaf was as bullish as ever. At Kut, he said, the Americans had been "bitterly defeated." At Hilla, too.

"We're giving them a real lesson today," he burbled. " `Heavy' doesn't accurately describe the level of casualties we have inflicted."

As for reports that American troops were nearing the airport at Baghdad, he chuckled. "The Americans aren't even 100 miles from Baghdad," he said.

CIVILIANS

Iraq Shows Casualties in Hospital

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

In Hilla, about 30 miles south of Baghdad, relatives of injured Iraqis crowded into Hilla Hospital on Wednesday. Iraqi officials said civilians were injured and killed in an American attack.

By TYLER HICKS with JOHN F. BURNS

ILLA, Iraq, April 2 — The boy was bewildered, perhaps 10 or 11, separated from his parents, lying on a hospital gurney. All about was chaos, mothers weeping for their dead and wounded children, doctors and nurses shouting to be heard, coffins shouldered along the corridors to taxis that stacked two and three on their roofs at a time, serving as makeshift hearses.

It was never clear, in the confusion, if the boy was told why he had been asked to follow the nurse out of the ward, down the passageway, past the lamentations and the cursings, to the operating theater. He seemed frightened, and if he heard the question, he never gave his name, or any details of how he got his wound.

Once on the operating table, quickly anesthetized, he knew nothing. His wounded arm was unbandaged and amputated rapidly by the surgeon just below the elbow.

So it was today at the general hospital in Hilla, an hour's drive south of Baghdad, on the road to the site of the ancient town of Babylon, now a soulless re-creation of ancient glory, built as a backdrop to one of Saddam Hussein's ubiquitous palaces. Hilla itself is a nondescript place, a town between here and there, mostly a rambling huddle.

But today Hilla was a front-line city, only a few miles north of American troops advancing up the strategic highway to Baghdad — and a showcase of what Mr. Hussein's government wants the world to believe about the American way of war.

Officials marshaling the buses from the Palestine Hotel in the capital made it plain that, for them, the case was open and shut, an example of American weapons being used indiscriminately to kill civilians.

The story of the hospital, as survivors and physicians told it, was of incidents on Sunday or Monday or Tuesday — accounts were confused — in which civilians had come under attack from an American tank that fired on a bus and a car and from an American aircraft that dropped cluster bombs on an impoverished outlying district of Hilla. Dr. Saad al-Fallouji, the hospital's chief surgeon, said that on Tuesday alone, the hospital received 33 victims dead on arrival and 180 others who were wounded by American fire. "Most of them — no, all of them — were civilians," he said. "All of them were from Nadir village, women and children and men of all ages, mostly they had very serious injuries to their abdomens, to their intestines, to their chests and their heads. Many of the bodies were completely torn apart."

Western reporters asked him how he felt about the carnage. "I feel very angry about this," he replied. "Don't you feel angry too?"

Reporters had no difficulty confirming that there had been scores of casualties — the dead evident in the procession of coffins, and in the torn bodies that crowded the shelves of the large refrigerator in the hospital's front garden, the wounded filling every ward, many eager to recount how they had come under American fire. Information Ministry officials translated the accounts.

Hussein Ali Hussein, 26, a door-to-door gas salesman, lay on a bed, the stump of one leg covered in a bloody bandage, a mass of flies settling on the gauze. He said that he had been in a car that was hit by an American tank shell as he drove south toward Kifl, near Najaf.

"We believed the Americans, when they said they were not going to attack civilians," he said. "Why would the Americans do this to me?" As nurses arrived to wheel him away for surgery, he added: "But we Iraqis will never accept that this country is ruled by anybody but Iraqis, so we will fight to the last drop of our blood."

Another patient, Bassan Hoki, 38, said he was in the bus attack. Surgeons had amputated his right arm above the elbow, and seeping bandages covered deep wounds on both his legs. Mr. Hoki, with a neatly trimmed, gray-flecked beard, gesticulated with his remaining arm as he described seeing the tank from the window of the bus.

"There was no warning, they simply opened fire," he said.

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He said that his mother, who was seated beside him, was killed instantly in the blast. "I looked around me, it seemed like everyone was dead," he said, "people's heads were snapped off their bodies. The bus was torn to pieces."

He said, "I have just one thing to say to George Bush. He is a criminal and a liar to talk of bringing us freedom. He attacks civilians for no reason. This is a crime, a crime, a crime."

It was difficult to mesh accounts from the hospital with the scenes where the attacks were said to have occurred. In Nadir, a sprawl of one- and two-story brick or mud homes astride the line of the American advance, reporters were shown the bus on which, doctors said, 18 people had been killed and 16 wounded by American tank fire. The bus stood in a clearing and reporters were led on a tour of sinuous alleyways to see the damage from what was described as the cluster bombing of an entire neighborhood.

From what officials at Nadir said and from what seemed probable to the eye, the attacks appeared to have been one. The bus, like the houses, appeared to have been hit not by a tank shell but by thousands of shards of shrapnel that had punctured it and shattered the windows but left the body mostly intact. Small, grayish-black pieces of unexploded ordnance, possibly a form of cluster bomb, lay scattered in profusion.

Nadir, by noon today, was deserted, save for families here and there loading up possessions into cars and glimpses of men in military uniforms, some with the red triangular shoulder flashes of the Republican Guard. Several reporters and photographers said later that they had seen a man in camouflage uniform disappearing into one of the houses, carrying a sniper rifle.

Whatever had occurred at Nadir, the incident was part of a wider pattern of increasing tension among Iraqi officials and American troops. Anxieties in the capital had risen overnight, with more intensive bombing of Mr. Hussein's palaces and other strategic targets.

All night long, and through the day, the bombs and missiles struck, booming across the city, with more shuddering of the earth and bursting fireballs of red and orange, as well as billowing clouds of smoke and dust.

From the upper rooms of the Palestine Hotel, especially those facing directly across the Tigris River, it seemed that the Pentagon, in returning to some targets, had in mind not just to destroy, not just to deny the Iraqi ruler the use of this palace or that intelligence headquarters, but to obliterate, perhaps to humiliate, by leaving nothing but smoking rubble.

The air defense headquarters on the east bank of the Tigris, close to the Palestine, were hit by at least two cruise missiles last week and were struck again on Monday night, this time by bombs dropped by aircraft low enough to hear overhead. The missile strikes appeared to have been enough to disable the headquarters, and with it much of the air defense system, since air raid sirens failed within days of the first attacks on Baghdad on March 20, and the anti-aircraft fire fell off sharply, too. But they had left the headquarters punctured, not destroyed, until bombing completed the job.

By Tuesday, all that was left was a mound of grayish-black rubble, and, perversely, a towering bronze statue of Mr. Hussein. arm raised in salute, which appeared hardly scratched.

The case for concluding that the military had had in mind the humiliation of Mr. Hussein and his sons has been made even more strongly by the repeated bombing of the Republican Palace compound, the jewel in the Iraqi ruler's crown. About an hour or two before first light today, at least five more huge blasts hit one of several large, colonnaded buildings clustered near the main palace, a neo-imperialist edifice that some Iraqis say has been one of the headquarters for Qusay, the favored younger son of Mr. Hussein.

Perhaps, these Iraqis have said, the target lies underground, in the maze of tunnels and bunkers built during the war with Iran in the 1980's.

But perhaps, here too, the objective was to obliterate. This morning an entire palace within the compound had disappeared, leaving only the building's signature feature — giant, 30-foot-high busts of Mr. Hussein clad in the headdress of the 12th-century warrior Saladin. Three of the busts stood on their pediments while a fourth, its back to the Tigris, leaned drunkenly forward.

Early today reporters on the bus to Hilla said they saw the park set aside for Baghdad's annual international trade fair with about a dozen large buildings completely flattened with smoke still rising.

Iraqi officials said later that the strike had hit a maternity clinic on the fairground, killing nine women.