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< < Back to Start of Article BLACK HILL, outskirts of Baghdad It took an anti-tank missile to blow a hole through the steel-reinforced wall surrounding the Special Republican Guard's headquarters at the foot of this hill overlooking the capital.
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An Iraqi soldier on a roof or perhaps two or more - in the chaos it was not clear - opened fired as Company B of the 101st Airborne Division's 3d Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment, poured through the breach Tuesday morning.
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Specialist Sylvester Prince, 19, was among those who rushed the sprawling complex under a volley of covering fire aimed at the roof. He clambered over concrete rubble and the corpses of Iraqi soldiers, the grim results of air and artillery strikes that led up to Tuesday's raid.
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"They were decapitated, bloated, stinking," he said of the dead.
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The American bullets that spattered off the two-story headquarters building, known as the Secretariat of the Special Republican Guard, rained concrete shards on the company, involved in its first significant fight of the war. For some of the roughly 120 soldiers, including Prince, it was the first significant fight ever.
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He ticked off what he had encountered so far:
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"Carcasses, debris, shrapnel in my face," he said, lying in a covered walkway and aiming his rifle deeper into the Special Republican Guard's complex, described by one officer Tuesday as "the Pentagon of Iraq."
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"Nothing too small for me," Prince said with a smirk, deeply unimpressed. His platoon scrambled to its feet and headed toward a row of military barracks behind the headquarters building, where the pop of gunfire still erupted spasmodically.
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The 101st Airborne Division's battalion - fighting since Sunday with the 1st Brigade of the army's 3d Infantry Division - advanced from Baghdad International Airport, about 2½ kilometers (a mile and a half) from here, expanding the army's control on the western side of the city and bringing its troops closer to those in the city center.
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"We're expanding and squeezing," said Major Frank McClary, the operations officer of the 1st Brigade's 3d Battalion, 7th Infantry Regiment.
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Despite the division's tanks in the center of the city, where intense fighting continued Tuesday, McClary expressed doubt that the pockets of Iraqi fighters would be suppressed soon.
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"Tactically wise, it's going to be going on for a long time," he said, as blasts of cannon fire from Bradley fighting vehicles reverberated around him. The Iraqis they are encountering, he said, still have rocket-propelled grenades. "Personally, I think it's going to be going on until we leave this country."
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He said American forces now needed to step up "psychological operations" to persuade the Iraqis to surrender.
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After having pushed through mostly open desert terrain, the 3d Division's larger mechanized forces turned to the 101st Airborne's infantry soldiers for the arduous, fearsome job of clearing this warren of buildings, which had once housed President Saddam Hussein's most loyal troops, those charged with protecting the government.
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The complex is on the southern side of Route 8, the main road leading from the airport into the center of Baghdad. By the time the division's soldiers arrived Tuesday morning - preceded by the thunderous strikes of satellite-guided missiles before dawn and then after first light by the belching cannons of A-10 jets firing from overhead - only small groups of Iraqi fighters remained.
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"They saw the size of us," said Captain Daniel Kidd, Company B's commander, "and took off."
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One A-10 crashed during Tuesday's fighting east of the airport, officers said, after it was hit by anti-aircraft fire. But the pilot ejected safely near the Euphrates River in an area to the southwest controlled by American forces and was rescued, military officials said.
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The narrow road leading into the complex was a tableau of destruction and debris. The swollen corpse of a uniformed Iraqi lay on the ground, where he fell. Those walls still standing were pocked from bullets and rockets.
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Staff Sergeant Anthony Hanlon, 24, called the first assault on the complex "the scariest thing imaginable," as the few Iraqi defenders fired on the 101st's soldiers with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades. There were no casualties among the Americans.
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The buildings inside, including the main headquarters, were battered shells, their beams exposed and broken. Outside the headquarters stood a statue of Saddam on a horse. Staff Sergeant Michael Young emerged from the building with a photograph of Saddam pinning medals on a row of officers.
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Almost simultaneously, the 101st's Company D assaulted Black Hill, a man-made mound south of the complex that rises more than 60 meters (200 feet) and overlooks the airport to the west and the farthest homes of Baghdad to the east. A little to the southwest between the hill and the airport lies a new presidential palace, still under construction.
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Since the 3d Division seized the airport Thursday night, Iraqi forces have used the hill's commanding view to direct at least one artillery attack on the airport and to shoot at soldiers inching along Route 8 toward the city limits.
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Tuesday's battle raised the specter of urban fighting - close combat in and around buildings. When Delta Company's soldiers attacked Tuesday morning, they ran into a thicket of gunfire from Iraqis, who at one point were only 80 meters away. Within minutes, however, the Americans overwhelmed the Iraqis, who fled through a grove of trees into the city.
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At the foot of the hill, soldiers found a cache of weapons in a guardhouse, including 53 AK-47s, as well as grenades and a mortar launcher. There were enough arms for two platoons, Sergeant First Class Patrick Keough said. The brief firefight lighted a locker of wool blankets. The fire spread to a grove of trees, sending choking white smoke rising around the hill.
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With American troops on the hill, the Iraqis opened fire from three single-story houses across an irrigated field. American artillery rounds exploded in the field, moving steadily closer and finally destroying two of the houses, which smoldered in the haze. An anti-tank missile flew into the third, punching through the glass before exploding.
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On the other side of the hill, American mortar rounds landed with whipsawing cracks in a green lake surrounding the new presidential palace. The battalion's commander, Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Fetterman, grew angry about the inaccurate fire. "Tell them to stop shooting," he shouted to no one in particular.
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"If they want to shoot, tell them to put it on the tower," he added, pointing to a tower on a causeway leading to what appeared to be a palace boathouse. The mortar rounds soon landed closer and closer to the causeway.
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A grass fire raged as the division's troops moved into a grove of palm trees on the palace grounds, but by Tuesday evening, they had not yet occupied the palace.
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At the top of the hill stood the remains of a monument - dedicated, according to its inscription, by Saddam on April 10, 2001 - which had been heavily damaged. It had included a metal bas-relief portrait of Saddam and an inscription that foretold the creation of a new Iraqi civilization.
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The hilltop, planted with new, half-dead trees, was cratered with the blasts of artillery rounds and strewn with ragged bits of metal.
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As for Saddam's portrait, it was in the back of a Delta Company Humvee. BLACK HILL, outskirts of Baghdad It took an anti-tank missile to blow a hole through the steel-reinforced wall surrounding the Special Republican Guard's headquarters at the foot of this hill overlooking the capital.
.
An Iraqi soldier on a roof or perhaps two or more - in the chaos it was not clear - opened fired as Company B of the 101st Airborne Division's 3d Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment, poured through the breach Tuesday morning.
.
Specialist Sylvester Prince, 19, was among those who rushed the sprawling complex under a volley of covering fire aimed at the roof. He clambered over concrete rubble and the corpses of Iraqi soldiers, the grim results of air and artillery strikes that led up to Tuesday's raid.
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"They were decapitated, bloated, stinking," he said of the dead."
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