U.S. and Britain Invade Iraq

NORTHERN KUWAIT (Reuters) - U.S. and British forces invaded Iraq overnight, crossing the desert border from Kuwait under cover of an intense artillery barrage, as a second air raid pounded targets in Baghdad.

As buildings blazed in the capital, officials in London and Washington said units of the U.S. Marine 1st Expeditionary Force and British Royal Marines had crossed into southern Iraq after nightfall.

"The whole thing is kicking off tonight," a British military source told Reuters on Thursday. "British forces are engaged."

U.S. officers said some Marine units had skirmished with Iraqi forces in the south.

Reuters reporter Sean Maguire saw long columns of vehicles snaking through the moonlit desert toward the border, after repeated salvoes that lit up the horizon with flashes of fire.

Artillery shells exploded west of Iraq's second city of Basra, only about 50 km (30 miles) from the Kuwaiti border. Sporadic bangs and flashes erupted every few seconds.

The smell of gunpowder wafted across the border on a gentle breeze.

Iraqi radio said cruise missiles had hit Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s family home in Baghdad at dawn during an initial attack U.S. officials said was intended to kill the Iraqi president.

The evening attack hit Saddam's main palace in the city.

Iraqi television said four Iraqi soldiers had been killed on Thursday and five wounded. It did not say where or how.

Kuwait's KUNA news agency said U.S. and British forces had seized the Iraqi border town of Umm Qasr, Iraq's biggest commercial port. Iraqi state television denied the report.

U.S. officials said the troop movements and the fresh wave of night bombing did not represent a massive military attack predicted by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

"This is all part of the preparation," one said.

President Bush has pledged to topple Saddam and destroy Iraq's alleged illegal arms programs. Saddam says that Iraq has no banned chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

Targets in Baghdad, in addition to Saddam's main palace on the banks of the Tigris river, included buildings around the planning ministry in the center of the city and in the southeast. An office of Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz was among those hit.

The whole western bank of the Tigris, which cuts through the city, was shrouded in smoke. Several government ministries are located on the west bank.

INTENSE ARTILLERY BARRAGES

To the east of the city, there were several explosions in the vicinity of the al Rashid military base.

State radio said there were no casualties in the dawn attack on Saddam's family home, which U.S. officials described as an opportunistic hit after intelligence information thought to pinpoint his location.

About 280,000 U.S. and British troops are in the Gulf region, many of them in Kuwait.

Units spearheading the invasion crossed the Iraqi border after intense artillery barrages

A CBS correspondent traveling with U.S. Marines said an unspecified number of Iraqi troops had surrendered.

Earlier, Reuters correspondents along the border reported explosions along the frontier and in the direction of the southern city of Basra.

"The first lot of big explosions came from the direction of Basra and then there were more west of that direction," said Reuters correspondent David Fox.

An Iraqi military spokesman said a U.S. troop-carrying helicopter had been shot down. U.S. officials said two helicopters had crash landed along the border. No one on board was hurt and neither was hit by ground fire, they added.

At least one U.S. unit reported coming under Iraqi fire.

"A U.S. unit was targeted by Iraqi mortar fire this evening on the Kuwait-Iraq border," a U.S. military source said. There were no reports of casualties.

An unidentified projectile landed harmlessly in the water near an offshore Kuwaiti oil loading terminal in the Gulf on Thursday evening, residents said.

As military planners assessed the results of the dawn strike, the United States pledged to wage a war of unprecedented scope and ferocity.

Throughout the day, thousands of U.S. troops in northern Kuwait donned their protective chemical suits during a series of alerts as Iraq fired up to four missiles at Kuwait.

Air raid sirens wailed in Kuwait City twice after midnight, the fifth and sixth alerts there since the war began. On each occasion, jittery residents barely had time to run down into shelters before the all-clear sounded.

There has been no evidence of chemical weapons being used.