Baghdad blast kills two soldiers

BAGHDAD — A suspected chemical weapons warehouse exploded in flames moments after U.S. troops broke in to search it yesterday, killing two soldiers and wounding five.

In Fallujah, U.S. troops came under heavy attack a day after U.S. officials decided to extend a cease-fire rather than launch a full-scale offensive on the city. One Marine and eight insurgents were killed.

The Iraqi Governing Council, meanwhile, approved a new flag for the country, dumping Saddam Hussein’s red-and-black standard. The design is white with two blue stripes representing the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and although it has a crescent representing Islam, the flag no longer bears the words “God is great.”

The blast in Baghdad leveled the front half of the one-story building and set ablaze four Humvees parked outside. A U.S.soldier was taken away on a stretcher, her chest and face severely burned. Several Iraqis were pulled from the wreckage, including a woman who wept as she was carried over a man’s shoulder to safety.

Afterward, dozens of cheering teenagers started to smash the abandoned Humvees. One child climbed onto the hood of a vehicle and beat it with a stick while a man held up a photo of radical Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Iraqis stripped the vehicles of equipment, one carrying a heavy machine gun, another waving a U.S. helmet. One man sported military headphones.

In Fallujah, Marines battled Sunni guerrillas around a mosque in Fallujah’s Jolan district, a poor neighborhood where insurgents are concentrated. Helicopter gunships joined the battle, which sent heavy black smoke over the city. Tank fire demolished a minaret from which officials said gunmen were firing.

The U.S. troops met “a real nasty bunch,” said Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne, commander of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment. But he said the violence would not deter plans to begin joint U.S.-Iraqi patrols in the city.

The United States decided to try the patrols after President Bush consulted with his commanders over the weekend, and the cease-fire was extended in part to allow for patrols to be organized.

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt did not say what sort of chemical munitions were believed to have been produced at the Baghdad warehouse. After the blast, there was no sign of precautions against chemicals. “Chemical munitions could mean any number of things,” including smoke grenades, he said.

The cause of the blast also was not clear. Gen. Kimmitt said a large number of explosives were in the building, located in the northern neighborhood of Waziriyah.

Asked about reports that the search team included members of the Iraq Survey Group the U.S. team looking for weapons of mass destruction Gen. Kimmitt said only: “The inspection was by a number of coalition forces.”

He said the owner of the site was “suspected of producing and supplying chemical agents” to Iraqi insurgents, but did not elaborate.

In the south, outside the holy city of Najaf, Shi’ite militiamen in cars fired rocket-propelled grenades at a U.S. position, witnesses said. Apache helicopters and U.S. troops opened fire and set the cars ablaze.

In Baghdad, Administrator L. Paul Bremer heightened warnings about the reported stockpiling of weapons in “mosques, shrines and schools” in Najaf and his spokesman said such actions make the sites fair targets for military action.

Shi’ite militias also remain a threat in other cities.

Militiamen ambushed Spanish troops in the city of Diwaniyah, south of Najaf, and in the ensuing battle, six Iraqi gunmen were killed. Insurgents in Karbala fired at Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov’s motorcade Sunday as he made a brief visit to his country’s troops. No one in the motorcade was hurt.

The deaths of the two soldiers in Baghdad and the Marine in Fallujah brought to 114 the number of U.S. troops killed in combat so far this month nearly as many as the 115 Americans killed during the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein a year ago.

The fighting in Fallujah was the latest violence to shake a 2-week-old cease-fire.

Still, U.S. officials said they wanted to press forward with a political track, a day after abruptly toning down threats to begin a full-out assault on the city.

“We will take the time necessary to see if there is not a political solution,” Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said yesterday. “But as you saw today, when our soldiers and our Marines are attacked, they will respond and they will respond with force to protect themselves.”

U.S. troops and Iraqi security forces are to start patrolling most parts of the city, except the Jolan area, probably Thursday. There was little guarantee that guerrillas, who Marines say have not abided by other parts of past negotiated agreements, will not attack the patrols.