Iraqi Soldiers

BAGHDAD, Iraq - In the deadliest ambush yet on Iraq's armed forces, guerrillas killed dozens of unarmed Iraqi soldiers, many apparently forced onto their stomachs and shot execution-style along a remote eastern highway near the Iranian border, Iraqi officials said yesterday. Estimates of the death toll from the Saturday incident ranged from three dozen to 51. Iraqi officials said gunmen disguised in Iraqi military uniforms stopped the U.S-trained soldiers as they rode home in a convoy of minibuses Saturday evening.

If U.S. troops entering Baghdad encounter Iraqi soldiers hiding among civilians, President Bush has authorized them to use tear gas to try to reduce casualties. But if they do, the U.S. military may be accused by other countries of violating the international ban on chemical weapons - an ironic prospect in a war whose goal is to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. The United States has long asserted that the Chemical Weapons Convention permits the use of tear gas to save lives when soldiers and civilians are tangled together in battle.

The battlefield Twelve Army soldiers are reported missing, seven of them believed killed and five taken prisoner by Iraqi soldiers after being ambushed near An Nasiriyah. Iraqi television aired footage of what it said were dead Americans and interviews with five U.S. prisoners. At least nine Marines were reported killed and an unknown number wounded in a battle near An Nasiriyah after being lured into a trap by Iraqi soldiers pretending to surrender. Two British pilots were killed when their Tornado jet was accidentally hit by a Patriot missile.

DHAHRAN, Saudi Arabia -- At least 180 Iraqi soldiers have fled to Saudi Arabia as defectors, and dozens more filter back and forth across the border every day seeking food and water from front-line Arab troops, according to senior U.S. officials here.The defections have become a source of U.S.-Saudi friction, with U.S. officials complaining that they have been barred from the interrogations of the Iraqi soldiers and expressing concern that the Saudis may be doing too little to encourage a further exodus.

RAWAH, Iraq -- Few Americans are greeted as warmly by Iraqi soldiers serving in the western desert of Anbar province as Maj. John Bilas, a Marine from Camp Pendleton. He pays them. Tall and sturdily built, Bilas recently climbed aboard a Black Hawk helicopter in Baghdad and headed for Al Asad, a military base in Anbar, the heartland of Iraq's Sunni Arab-led insurgency. He carried more than $2 million in cash. Over the next several days, riding in Humvee convoys, he would make the dangerous journey across Anbar to outposts and bases to deliver the payroll for the soldiers of Iraq's 7th Army Division.

SHU AIBA, Iraq - The confused scene yesterday on the outskirts of Basra, the largest town in southern Iraq, typified the allied campaign so far: general retreat by the Iraqis with groups of fierce holdouts. On the one hand, there was surrender. Across the southern desert yesterday, so many Iraqi soldiers gave up so quickly that U.S. Marines hardly knew what to do with them. The surrender Friday of the Iraqi army's 51st Mechanized Division, coupled with similar capitulations across the plains yesterday, combined to form the sort of problem that a general might dream about: What to do with all these fighters who are throwing down their guns?

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Navy has launched a formal investigation into allegations that U.S. servicemen, on the second day of the Persian Gulf war, shot Iraqi soldiers as they tried to surrender to a naval combat team, Navy officials said yesterday.It is the first major, publicly acknowledged inquiry that the military has launched into charges of wrongdoing by U.S. military personnel serving in the Persian Gulf. International law governing the conduct of war forbids any attack on troops attempting to surrender.

FORT RILEY, Kan. -- The U.S. Army division that broke through Saddam Hussein's defensive front line used plows mounted on tanks and combat earthmovers to bury thousands of Iraqi soldiers -- some still alive and firing their weapons -- in more than 70 miles of trenches, according to Army officials.In the first two days of ground fighting in Operation Desert Storm, three brigades of the 1st Mechanized Infantry Division, known as "The Big Red One," used the grisly innovation to destroy trenches and bunkers being defended by more than 8,000 Iraqi soldiers, according to division estimates.

The trickle of Americans evacuated from the Persian Gulf reached Baltimore-Washington International Airport yesterday as a jetliner carrying 140 hostages, including 90 children, arrived after an exhausting two-day journey from war-ravaged Kuwait.As an airport bus carried the former hostages from their jumbo jet to a dingy old hangar, transformed by flowers and red-white-and-blue bunting into a festive reception area, children pressed their noses to the bus windows and waved to waiting reporters.

HILLA, Iraq - The main column of U.S. Marines set to attack Iraq's capital raced northward yesterday, rolling on the country's main highway to within 70 miles of Baghdad and drawing only minimal resistance. The convoy, including dozens of tanks and about 14,000 combat troops, began its journey in the Iraqi desert and ended 40 miles away, along the newly formed front lines from which Iraqi soldiers had retreated hours before. Night fell to sounds of U.S. artillery bombarding the remnants of an Iraqi force that troops here said had been decimated by a U.S. advance team early yesterday.