Ground War Starts, Airstrikes Continue As U.S. Keeps Focus on Iraq's Leaders

While the border was not breached until this evening, ground fighting began far earlier in the day as U.S. units moved up to the Iraqi border and prepared to breach the line of sand berms, trenches and electrified fence. "There's been a number of small engagements along the border all day -- mortars, machine guns, nothing big," said Col. John Coleman, chief of staff for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.

At 6:30 p.m., the Marines called in an airstrike on a 550-foot hill outside the Iraqi border town of Safwan to destroy an Iraqi observation post. U.S. warplanes dropped 11 JDAM precision-guided bombs on the hill.

The fires in oil wells and pipelines generated fears that Hussein's government was fulfilling threats to blow up Iraq's oil fields to deny the U.S. government an asset it hopes will fund postwar reconstruction. Reports of oil fires in Iraq, which is home to the world's second-largest crude reserve, sent oil prices surging, even after the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries tried to calm markets by pledging to speed output to make up for any disruption in Iraqi exports.

The first blow in Iraq's retaliatory missile strikes, identified by military officials as a CSSC-3 Seersucker cruise missile, slammed into the desert at 10:28 a.m., outside Camp Commando, the main headquarters for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force about 25 miles south of the Iraqi border.

At least three missiles were apparently intercepted by Patriot missile batteries, U.S. officials said. In one case, an Army battalion commander said, three Patriot missiles were required to shoot down one of the Iraqi missiles because of an unspecified malfunction. But in general, the commander said that the new generation of Patriots performed better than the much-hyped but relatively ineffective Patriots used 12 years ago during the Gulf War.

Military officials said the missiles fired later in the day were either Ababil-100s or Al Samoud-2s. Iraq's possession of the Al Samouds, a newer and more powerful version of the Ababil, has been banned by the United Nations because their range exceeds a 93-mile limit imposed by the U.N. Security Council after the Gulf War. U.N. weapons inspectors had been supervising Iraq's destruction of more than 60 Al Samoud-2s before the teams were ordered out of Iraq on Monday.

One of the Iraqi missiles, which U.S. official believe was launched from the city of Basra, streaked over Kuwait and crashed into the Persian Gulf.

About 16 hours before the ground invasion began, the first strikes of the war soared from U.S. warships in the seas near Iraq. Thirty-six Tomahawk cruise missiles streaked from two destroyers, two cruisers and two attack submarines positioned in the Persian Gulf and Red and Mediterranean seas. They were launched as the moon was still shining; the missiles hurtled through the air roughly an hour before dawn.

On the USS Abraham Lincoln, the lead aircraft carrier in the Gulf, the start of the war surprised most of the crew. Many of the carrier's 115 fighter pilots were still asleep and an advancement exam that had been scheduled weeks ago was administered to hundreds of enlisted sailors.

"They started the war and forgot to tell us," quipped one of the pilots in the squadron that operates F/A-18E Super Hornets, the Navy's newest warplane. "This isn't the beginning yet -- that's when Baghdad gets all lit up with lights," said Lt. Rob Kihm, 28, who piloted a Super Hornet patrol over southern Iraq during the morning and returned to the ship without dropping any bombs.

Even high-level commanders were taken unaware by the early start. The early morning decapitation attack on Baghdad was launched in such secrecy that Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, who as V Corps commander is the senior U.S. Army officer in Kuwait, was said by an Army source to have learned of the attack while watching CNN.

The results of the morning strike were unclear. Hussein appeared hours later on national television to castigate the U.S. military campaign.

With the air war launched early, the ground attack was advanced by 24 hours in an order issued this morning, the Army source said, with some quick shifts required as a result. The 101st Airborne Division had planned to take two days to assemble its ground assault convoys before heading into Iraq, for instance, but that timeline was cut in half.

As seen from a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter late this afternoon, the Army convoys headed toward the border stretched nearly from horizon to horizon: open-sided trucks packed with infantrymen, heavily laden Humvees, 5,000-gallon tankers, 2,500-gallon tankers, earthmoving equipment, military vans, 18-wheel trucks, even leased Kuwaiti buses.

Several breakdowns caused delays for one 101st Airborne convoy, and there was a brief snarl when tanks and armored personnel carriers from the 3rd Infantry Division cut past unarmored vehicles from the 101st Airborne.

Senior officers speculated that the acceleration was intended to maintain the momentum of the attempted decapitation attack. That would be an echo of the Gulf War of 12 years ago, when the main ground attack by the Army's VII Corps was accelerated by nearly 24 hours on orders from Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf in an effort to capitalize on the early success of his preliminary forces.

Correspondents Rick Atkinson, Peter Baker, William Branigin and Lyndsey Layton with U.S. forces and staff writers Bradley Graham and Thomas E. Ricks in Washington contributed to this report.