NAJAF, Iraq - Diving from clear skies, U.S. attack helicopters swooped low over the rooftops of this central Iraq city on Tuesday, destroying buildings and homes used by Iraqi militia to shoot at American soldiers.
As they inched deeper into the heart of Najaf, the 1st Brigade of the 101st Airborne lobbed mortar and artillery rounds at Iraqi fighters, who returned fire with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.
Then the Iraqis suddenly retreated into the city's renowned, gold-domed Mosque of Ali. The American firepower chased them. And Col. Ben Hodges' heart caught in his throat.
"It looked like a round was going to hit that mosque," said Hodges, commander of the 1st Brigade.
The round fell clear of the mosque, which sits atop the tomb of Imam Ali, the Prophet Muhammad's son-in-law and a martyr of the Shiite branch of Islam. But Hodges' momentary fear spoke to the larger dilemma facing American forces as they battle their way into some of the holiest cities of Shiite Islam.
How do you root out lethal militia elements while preserving Najaf's religious heritage and avoiding the enmity of its devout followers?
The same difficult task faces American troops about 50 miles up the road to Baghdad in Karbala, home to the tomb of Muhammad's martyred grandson. The problem is that hundreds of militia fighters have retreated into such sites considered holy by the very people American commanders hope will befriend them and rise up against Saddam Hussein.
In Najaf, Iraqi fighters have retreated into the Mosque of Ali and the Wadi al-Salem, a cemetery where Shiites from around the world hope to be buried. An adage says that being laid to rest next to Ali for one day is better than 700 years worth of prayers.
American commanders know the delicate situation they face. "We understand the sensitivity to us being in this city," Hodges said. "And we are going out of our way to be extremely sensitive to that. It's the fighters who are disrespecting those places by hiding and fighting from them."
Ali's shrine in the center of Najaf, with its silver-covered tomb, ceramic ornamented walls and resplendent golden dome and minarets is considered one of the landmarks of Islamic art.
Along with Karbala, Najaf is the center of pilgrimage for Iraq's Shiite majority and tens of thousands of Iranian Shiites. The late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, spent 14 years of his exile in Najaf after being expelled by the Shah.
What happens around Najaf and Karbala in the coming days may be decisive in any future relationship between the Shiites and the Americans.
So as American helicopters unloaded their Hellfire missiles Tuesday, they took care to strike buildings on either side of the Mosque of Ali but not the shrine itself. The attacks reduced the targeted structures to piles of twisted rubble but left the holy site largely untouched.
"We couldn't have gotten closer to the mosque than we did," Col. Ben Hodges, commander of the 1st Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, said Tuesday. "I mean, there are probably scraps of shrapnel on its parking lot. But today is evidence that we can pound the hell out of the Fedayeen and the Baath Party and not lay a single glove on that golden globe."
Heavy, armored bulldozers plowed through the gravel along the main road into the city, uprooting and denoting land mines.
The commander estimated the number of fighters remaining in Najaf is between 100 and 400. By late evening, there was no estimate of Iraqi casualties from the day of fighting and shelling. No American soldiers had been injured or killed.
Tuesday started with a high-profile convoy of tanks into the heart of Najaf, a trip dubbed "Thunder Run" by military planners. The tanks rolled into Saddam Circle, where the gunners had been told there was a statue of the Iraqi president. When the tanks arrived, however, the statue was gone; only the stone on which it had rested remained, along with several posters of Saddam.
"When the statue wasn't there, we figured we'd still do what we were sent to do," said Sgt. Kelly Heathman, 28. "So we shot the posters up."
Hodges said the procession into town had been planned for a number of reasons: to distract fighters from other parts of the city that the 101st was securing, to send a "psychological message" and to deter militia fighters from moving positions.
"The key reason was to show the citizens we aren't a threat to them and to show the enemy that we aren't afraid of them," he said. "We'll come into the city center anytime we want."
American military presence was apparent everywhere. On the main intersection leading into Najaf - where thousands of civilians pass on foot each day because it sits between the city and a bus depot - soldiers had set up "Checkpoint Charlie," named for the company from the 1st Battalion of the 327th Infantry Regiment that seized the site Sunday.
Lines of sometimes hundreds of people formed, and soldiers searched every person coming into or leaving the city.
The townspeople of Najaf, laden with impatient toddlers and grocery bags overflowing with produce from a local market, waited quietly in line. One man, eager to show his English to a reporter, saluted and said, "Good morning. Good morning, America. Hello."
Another man, with deformed, partly missing fingernails, said they had been pulled out by Baath Party militia several years ago. In Arabic he repeated again and again: "Saddam's finished."
Throughout the morning several other men handed the soldiers identification cards when their turn in line had arrived. Then they spoke what seemed to be their only two words of English: "I surrender."
A few kilometers from Checkpoint Charlie, within sight of the Ali mosque's gold dome, soldiers roamed the expansive grounds of a military school they had seized the previous day. An interpreter read signs and other paperwork in the blown-out buildings around the complex and explained that it was an infantry training school.
As in other facilities the 101st Airborne soldiers have occupied in and around Najaf, virtually every room of the infantry school had a framed painting of Saddam.
One building appeared to have been where soldiers were issued weapons. Thousands of old, wood-butted, assault rifles leaned in perfectly lined gun racks; the American soldiers piled them in a 4-foot-high pile in a courtyard and debated Tuesday afternoon whether they should blow them up or run them over with an M1-A1 tank.
A portion of the compound was thought to be Baath Party headquarters. A warehouse held thousands of military uniforms - green military sweaters, black dress berets and military pins that read, in Arabic, "God's Militia." Gas masks and rubber gloves and boots lay everywhere. Framed illustrations on walls showed the proper way of responding to a biological or chemical attack.
An estimated 44 Iraqis were killed in the taking of the compound Monday, according to Capt. Joe Cimato, assistant operations officer of the 1st Battalion. He said many of the men who fought there came from nearby houses and picked up weapons to fight; their bodies were placed at the rear of the compound, near the homes, and Cimato said family members had come to retrieve most of them.
The intensity of the fighting in Najaf - several days old by Tuesday - has surprised military planners.
Militia fighters, they say, have driven cars into tanks, shooting all the way to their deaths. Fighters constantly fire small arms from rooftops at passing Humvees. Other fighters launch rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs, into the strongholds where American soldiers have created encampments.
One street in the city has become so well known for its fighters that the soldiers call it "RPG alley."
Hodges, the 1st Brigade Commander, said Tuesday that elements of the Republican Guard had been stopped as they attempted to come south into the city. He said they were traveling in plainclothes and non-military vehicles loaded with weapon supplies.
When asked whether the 101st Airborne's decision to engage fighters at Najaf was a deviation from the initial plan of racing to Baghdad, Hodges was blunt.
"I was personally surprised and professionally embarrassed as an infantry colonel that I didn't give the Iraqis enough credit for their tenacity," he said. "They aren't skilled fighters, but they are certainly tenacious."
But he added that changing a military strategy isn't an admission of defeat but rather an adaptation to the enemy.
"You fight the enemy, not the plan," Hodges said. "The plan, no matter how good it is, always changes. The enemy gets a vote."
Just as he was asked how long it would be until Najaf was considered fully in American control, a helicopter dived into a neighborhood less than a kilometer away, attacking a house thought to be a Baath Party stronghold.
"You can never say," he said, "but I'd be pretty surprised if I was standing here listening to this next week."
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