Al-Karamah, Jordan — U.S. and British special forces appeared to be on the move in Iraq's Western desert Thursday, following up on air strikes that could prepare the ground for a second front in the march on Baghdad.
Travellers who made their way into Jordan from Iraq Thursday said they saw several targets along the Baghdad-Amman highway that had been hit in the early hours of the air assault, including a telecommunications tower, a restaurant and an airfield that U.S. intelligence feared might be used as a Scud-missile launch site.
The strike on the H-3 airfield, as it is called, not only could prevent a missile attack on Israel, it could give U.S.-led coalition forces an advance base inside Iraq from which to launch attacks on Baghdad, just a few hundred kilometres to the east.
U.S. officials passed word to the Israeli government that coalition special forces were working in western Iraq to suppress the threat of Scud-missile attacks, Israeli news media reported Thursday.
Jordan's border with Iraq, just beyond the village of al-Karamah, was sealed from the Iraqi side Thursday and declared a military zone.
Jordanian Information Minister Mohammed Adwan said Thursday that the war in Iraq is a "critical" threat to his country's stability.
Those who passed by H-3 Thursday said they could see huge plumes of smoke coming from the area of the airfield and the nearby oil-pumping station. The smoke, however, may not have been caused by a U.S. missile attack. The Pentagon asserted Thursday that Iraqi forces had set oil fields ablaze in western Iraq and other parts of the country.
Israeli officials continued to rate the chances of a Scud attack against Israel as low. They said the greatest danger likely is in the first 72 hours of the war; the time it would take for U.S. forces to subdue the threat.
Although the damage to H-3 was unclear Thursday, Iraqis crossing the border said a telecommunications tower 300 kilometres east of Baghdad had been directly hit. Talib Hussein, an oil-truck driver, said he saw only flames and rubble where the tower used to stand. There looked to be civilian casualties from the strike, he said.
"The tower was destroyed. There was an oil tanker on fire by the side of the road that had stopped in a rest area beside the tower," Mr. Hussein said. "Other cars were hit, too."
News reports indicated that Ahmed al-Baz, a 34-year-old Jordanian driver, was killed in the attack. His colleagues said he had stopped at the tower to make a phone call when a missile struck.
There may have been other casualties along the route in the first night of bombardment. An Iraqi who drove a busload of Sudanese migrant workers to a refugee camp in Jordan said he saw a restaurant by the side of the Baghdad-Amman highway that seemed to have come under missile attack in the first hours of the bombardment Thursday.
"There were damaged cars and dead people in the restaurant," the driver, Abu Abbas, said.
By Thursday evening, about 275 people had arrived in Jordan to claim refugee status, all but a handful of them Sudanese migrant workers. Many arrived on buses arranged by the Sudanese embassy in Baghdad.
With a report from Paul Adams in Tel Aviv
