Allies run into setbacks

Iraq used ambushes and even fake surrenders to kill and capture U.S. troops Sunday, inflicting the first significant casualties on the allied forces driving toward Baghdad. U.S. war leaders declared the invasion on target despite the bloody setbacks.

Up to nine Marines died and a dozen U.S. soldiers were taken prisoner in surprise engagements with Iraqis at An Nasiriyah, a southern city far from the forward positions of the allied force.

On the third day of the ground war, any expectation that Iraqi defenders would simply fold was gone.

"Clearly they are not a beaten force," said Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "This is going to get a lot harder."

Even so, the U.S.-British coalition fought to within 100 miles of Baghdad and tended to a growing northern front.

And at the end of a day filled with plenty of bad news for allied forces, U.S. officials said troops had made what could be an important discovery: a suspected chemical factory near the city of Najaf. U.S. Central Command said troops were examining several "sites of interest," but that it was premature to call the Najaf facility a chemical weapons factory.

Early Monday, Baghdad was bombarded with what appeared to be its strongest airstrikes since Friday, even as a mosque blared "God is great" and "Thanks be to God," perhaps to boost Iraqis' morale.

Allied soldiers came under attack in a series of ruses Sunday, U.S. officials said, with one group of Iraqis waving the white flag of surrender, then opening up with artillery fire; another group appearing to welcome coalition troops but then attacking them.

Lt. Gen. John Abizaid of U.S. Central Command said a faked surrender near An Nasiriyah, a crossing point over the Euphrates River northwest of Basra, set off the "sharpest engagement of the war thus far." Up to nine Marines died before the Americans prevailed, he said.

Twelve U.S. soldiers were missing and presumed captured by Iraqis in an ambush on an army supply convoy at An Nasiriyah, Central Command said.

"We, of course, will be much more cautious in the way that we view the battlefield as a result of some of these incidents," Abizaid said.

Arab television showed what it said were four American dead in an Iraqi morgue and at least five other Americans identified as captured soldiers.

"I come to shoot only if I am shot at," said one prisoner, who said he was from Kansas. Asked why he was fighting Iraqis, he replied: "They don't bother me; I don't bother them."

'They have no future'

U.S. and British officials said some of the stiffest resistance was coming from paramilitary forces known as the Fedayeen Saddam and from Saddam Hussein's personal security forces.

"These are men who know that they will have no role in the building of a new Iraq and they have no future," said Peter Wall, chief of staff to the British military contingent in the U.S.-led coalition.

President Bush kept his eye on the big prize -- the removal of Saddam's government and Iraq's eventual disarmament.

"I know that Saddam Hussein is losing control of his country," Bush said upon his return from the Camp David retreat in Maryland. "We are slowly but surely achieving our objective." He demanded that U.S. prisoners of war be treated humanely.

With allies closing in, Iraqi leaders appealed for a united Arab front to condemn the invasion but knew they wouldn't get it. "There is no hope in these rulers," Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan said.

But Russia and Chinese foreign ministers reasserted their view that the invasion has no legal basis and asked for an immediate halt.

The State Department, for its part, protested that Russian companies sold sensitive military equipment to Iraq in the run-up to the war, maintaining some of the equipment could pose a direct threat to coalition forces.

Moved 230 miles

In the most notable gain for the coalition, soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division's 2nd Brigade moved 230 miles in 40 hours, killing scores of Iraqi militiamen who engaged them with machine guns, to take positions less than a day's journey from Baghdad.

The brigade raced day and night across rugged desert in more than 70 tanks and 60 Bradley fighting vehicles. No American injuries were reported in that battle.

Iraqi Defense Minister Lt. Gen. Sultan Hashim Ahmed expressed confidence his troops can hold the capital.

"If they want to take Baghdad they will have to pay a heavy price," he said.

Several other allied units engaged in intensive gunbattles Sunday. In southern Iraq, a soldier from the 3rd Infantry Division died in a vehicle accident.

Efforts intensified to assemble forces in northern Iraq, where air strikes have gone after radicals linked to the al-Qaida terrorist network but prospects for ground assaults have been limited because neighboring Turkey balked on becoming a staging ground.

A U.S. official said two Tomahawk cruise missiles malfunctioned Sunday and landed in Turkey. The missiles landed in unpopulated areas.

Near the Persian Gulf, Marines seized an Iraqi naval base Sunday morning at Az Zubayr.

Near Basra in the south, Marines saw hundreds of Iraqi men -- apparently soldiers who had taken off their uniforms -- walking along a highway with bundles on their backs past burned-out Iraqi tanks.

Allied forces have captured Basra's airport and a bridge. But commanders say they are in no rush to storm the city, hoping instead that Iraqi defenders decide to give up.

Although Iraq was getting little help diplomatically, many in the Muslim world expressed anger about the war.

Anti-war protests continued in many cities around the world, one of the biggest in Pakistan. Children in Lahore chanted anti-American slogans and other demonstrators carried portraits of Osama bin Laden and Saddam as more than 100,000 people joined in a peaceful rally.