Strikes hit command structures

American-led forces bombed Iraqi targets and battled troops across Saddam Hussein's slowly shrinking domain Thursday, battering the regime's communications and command facilities in Baghdad.

U.S. officials began sending reinforcements to the region and reported 25 Marines wounded after a friendly fire incident around An Nasiriyah.

The Iraqi regime breathed defiance even as coalition troops encircled its capital city. "The enemy must come inside Baghdad, and that will be its grave," Defense Minister Sultan Mashem Ahmed declared.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld suggested that U.S. forces might lay siege to the capital and hope Iraqis rise up against the government.

Eight days after the launching of Operation Iraqi Freedom, President Bush met with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and declined to set a timetable for the war. It will last "however long it takes" to win, he said, thumping the lectern for emphasis.

Both men said the United Nations could help rebuild postwar Iraq, but sidestepped tricky questions of who would create and run a new government once Saddam is toppled.

Bunker busting

A U.S. B-2 bomber dropped two 4,700-pound, satellite-guided "bunker busting" bombs on a major communications tower on the east bank of the Tigris River in downtown Baghdad, U.S. military officials said. They said the strike was meant to hamper communications between Saddam's regime and Iraq's military. Air assaults zeroed in on one of Saddam's presidential compounds in the heart of the capital.

"Coalition air forces and Tomahawk missiles took out a communications and command and control facilities in the capital city during the night," said Lt. Cmdr. Charles Owens, a spokesman reading from a bulletin at the command center in Camp As Sayliyah.

In the war zone, sandstorms abated and the Americans and British reported flying 1,500 missions during the day as they exploited their unchecked air superiority. British forces reported destroying 14 Iraqi tanks near Basra -- their largest such take since World War II.

Warplanes bombed positions in northern Iraq near Kurdish-held areas and hit Republican Guard forces menacing American ground forces 50 miles south of Baghdad. Thunderous explosions rocked the capital after nightfall in one of the strongest blasts in days, filling the sky with flames and thick smoke after one of Saddam's presidential palaces was hit.

Combat aircraft dropped bombs "just about as fast as we can load them," said Capt. Thomas A. Parker, aboard the USS Kitty Hawk in the Persian Gulf.

Cargo planes flew military supplies into northern Iraq after 1,000 American airborne troops parachuted in to secure an airfield. One source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said additional personnel were being flown in, and that an early objective would be securing the northern oil fields near Kirkuk. Invading forces took control of southern Iraqi oil fields in the early hours of the ground war.

Several miles away, Kurdish militiamen and villagers celebrated the fall during the day of a hilltop position where Iraqi forces had menaced civilians for years.

U.S. forces had pounded the northern hills around Chamchamal over the past several days, and it appeared that the Iraqis abandoned their checkpoint and bunkers and retreated to the west.

In central Iraq, the first resupply plane landed on a restored runway at Tallil Airfield -- hastily renamed "Bush International Airport" by American forces who had secured it.

Still, Iraqi resistance continued to slow the drive on the capital and kept American and British forces out of key cities such as Basra and An Nasiriyah. Its mines kept ships with humanitarian assistance from unloading their cargo at the southern port city of Umm Qasr.

After eight days of fighting, Pentagon officials said close to 90,000 U.S. troops were in Iraq, and that an additional 100,000 to 120,000 were on the way. All were part of a military blueprint made up long ago, officials said, sensitive to criticism that commanders had underestimated the need for troops to quell stronger-than-expected resistance or protect long supply lines.

Bush and Blair met as anti-war protests flared anew in the United States. In New York, hundreds of demonstrators lined three blocks of Fifth Avenue and dozens more lay down in the street in a "die-in." At the United Nations, the U.S. ambassador walked out of a debate on the war after Iraq's ambassador accused the United States of trying to exterminate the Iraqi people.

One day after Iraq claimed more than a dozen civilians were injured in a missile strike in Baghdad, Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks said it was possible that an Iraqi missile was responsible. "It may have been a deliberate attack inside of town," he added.

More than 25 Marines were wounded in fighting near An Nasiriyah, one of the southern Iraq cities where irregular forces have put up far more resistance than American military planners expected. U.S. officials said some or all of them were hurt when one Marine unit mistakenly fired on another. No deaths were reported and no Marines were missing from that incident, officials said. Brooks said the battle lasted 90 minutes, and WTVD-TV of Durham, N.C., which has a reporter with the Marines in An Nasiriyah, reported the Marines had been wounded during fierce house-to-house fighting.

To the south, British forces continued efforts to gain control over Basra, but die-hard defenders of Saddam's regime have held positions inside the city amid reports of clashes with the local population.

Adm. Michael Boyce, chief of the British defense staff, told reporters that British forces destroyed 14 Iraqi tanks that tried to leave the city during the morning. Historians said it was Britain's biggest such battle since World War II.

Iraqis accused U.S. and British forces of targeting civilians. They, in turn, were accused of seizing Iraqi children to force their fathers into battle.

"They are targeting the human beings in Iraq to decrease their morale," Iraqi Health Minister Omeed Medhat Mubarak told reporters. Officials said about 350 civilians had been killed in the operation, and more than 3,500 others injured.