March 23, 2003	Sunday	Muharram 19, 1424

WASHINGTON, March 22: The United States has not held general surrender talks with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s government, and efforts to persuade parts of his military to give up did not yield results good enough to avert a major assault, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Friday night.

“We have been issuing, through a variety of methods, communications urging the Iraqi military to surrender, and apparently what we have done thus far has not been sufficiently persuasive that they would have done that,” Mr Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon briefing.

“It may very well be that, with the initiation of the ground war last evening and the initiation of the air war this afternoon, that we may find people responding and surrendering.”

Mr Rumsfeld spoke shortly after the United States launched a massive aerial bombardment of Baghdad.

He said thus far a few hundred Iraqi troops had surrendered to invading US and British forces.

Gen Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Iraqi forces were offering only “sporadic resistance” and some had abandoned positions in the south and north.

The defence secretary said there was no “country-to-country dialogue taking place” about the idea of a general Iraqi surrender.

US officials have described efforts to convince Iraqi forces not to fight involving communications including cellular telephone calls, e-mails, leaflets dropped by aircraft and other means.

Mr Rumsfeld had said on Thursday that contacts had been made with the dispirited Iraqi regular army, as well as parts of the elite Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard thought to be most loyal to Saddam. On Friday, Rumsfeld said most of the contacts had been with Iraqi forces outside of Baghdad.

He said he did not know whether Saddam remained in control of Iraq. Asked if he had any indication that Iraq’s leadership had changed hands, he said he had heard “scraps of information” but not enough to be persuasive.

Mr Rumsfeld said the opening strike of the war targeting a headquarters outside Baghdad where the United States believes members of the Iraqi leadership, including President Saddam, had gathered had been successful. “The question is, what was in there?”

Asked whether it was too late for Saddam and his two powerful sons, Uday and Qusay, to go into exile, Rumsfeld said, “It is certainly too late for them to stay in power. What they do with themselves is up to them. ... I guess time will tell what kinds of judgments they’ll make. So far they’ve made very poor judgments.”

He said the decision to launch the ground and air campaign was a direct result of the fact that “Saddam Hussein and his crowd did not leave the country.”

Gen Myers said the United States now had troops in western and northern Iraq in addition to the south and were putting more troops into northern Iraq.

US officials said American Special Operations troops captured two key airfields in the Iraqi desert between 225kms and 290kms west of Baghdad in a move to surround the capital.

The US effort has been hampered in northern Iraq by Turkey’s refusal to allow basing rights for as many as 62,000 troops to make a thrust from that country in a two-pronged attack on Baghdad. It also has increased concerns in Washington that Turkey itself might put large numbers of troops into northern Iraq to face Kurdish groups who control the area.

“We have special forces units connected to Kurdish forces in the north,” Rumsfeld said. “And you can be certain that we have advised the Turkish government and the Turkish armed forces that it would be notably unhelpful if they went into the north in large numbers.”

“We must not get too comfortable,” Myers said. “We’re basically on our plan and moving toward Baghdad, but there are still many unknowns out there.”—Reuters