Day 13: Deadly firefights in Iraq, political skirmishes in London - and the bombs keep falling on Baghdad

Coalition forces in Iraq have two aims. The first is to remove Saddam Hussein from power, and with him any weapons of mass destruction he may or may not turn out to have. The second is to win the goodwill of the Iraqi people so that they will look favourably upon American-led attempts to establish democracy. As Day Thirteen unfolded, what became increasingly clear was that these two war aims are often not compatible.

Overnight the Ministry of Defence announced that a 26th British soldier had been killed in Iraq on Monday "in the course of his duties", but gave no further details. Military deaths were overshadowed yesterday by civilian ones. News broke of the death of another unarmed Iraqi who was driving a pick-up truck at speed towards a checkpoint. The incident occurred after US troops killed seven women and children by opening fire on a vehicle at a military checkpoint near Najaf. A political storm began brewing.

Doubts are being cast on the official version of events, which claimed that soldiers fired warning shots, and then fired into the engine, before firing at the passengers. General Peter Pace, the number two military commander at the Pentagon, said the US soldiers had acted absolutely correctly. But then The Washington Post claimed that warning shots were fired too late to be effective. The paper reported that Captain Ronny Johnson of the 3rd Infantry Division shouted at a platoon leader: "You just ... killed a family because you didn't fire a warning shot soon enough!"

The cause of the jumpiness by checkpoint soldiers was the suicide bombing near Najaf on Saturday. Claims yesterday by the Iraqi Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan that some 6,000 Arab volunteers have arrived in Iraq ­ more than half of them suicide bombers ­ will do little to dispel the edginess.

Such tactics drove a wedge between the military force and the civilian population, said General Wesley Clark, the former supreme allied commander Europe who led Nato forces during the Kosovo campaign. "Terrorism makes armies treat civilians as potential enemies, and makes winning their support all the more difficult. And this is exactly the intent."

Thousands of Egyptians took part in a mass anti-US rally in Alexandria with many protesters dressed as suicide bombers carrying fake sticks of dynamite. In Tehran, a truck laden with barrels of fuel was crashed into the British embassy, killing the driver, though no embassy staff were injured. In Damascus, the government called on Arab leaders not to lend any assistance to US troops ­ and the highest religious authority in Syria called for jihad against foreign troops in Iraq. In Amman, four Iraqi nationals were reported to have been arrested for trying to blow up a hotel used by Western journalists in the Jordanian capital. Later, in New York, the secretary general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, said there was "lots of unhappiness" at how the war was going.

The political skirmishing continued in London. The renegade Labour MP George Galloway appeared on television unrepentant for the outrage he had caused in an interview with an Abu Dhabi television station in which he was accused of saying that coalition forces "attack Iraq like wolves", and asking when Arab leaders would wake up and "stand by the Iraqi people?" However, he later insisted he had been misrepresented, saying the "wolves" were "Bush and Blair, not the soldiers. The soldiers are lions led by donkeys, sent to kill and be killed."

From Tony Blair's other flank, the former cabinet minister Mo Mowlam called for bombing to be stepped up to ensure a quick win "even if that means street-to-street fighting, and the dreadful level of casualties that will go along with it".

Downing Street came up with a "three-phase" plan to explain how things were not bogged down. Phase One was "the coalition taking a strategic grip on Iraq in the first days ... securing oilfields, isolating towns in the south such as Basra, making sure the west of Iraq could not be used to attack neighbouring states and beginning to move into the north, as well as moving very quickly towards Baghdad." Phase Two was "steady advance ... moving in on Basra, wearing down the opposition, beginning the process of changing the military profile in those areas where we are in control". Phase Three was an assault on Baghdad ­ "removing Saddam and his regime."

Further evidence of a concerted attempt by the Government to regain the PR initiative came with a speech by the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, to a meeting of newspaper editors in which he claimed that it is "increasingly probable" that the first of the two explosions that caused a large number of civilian deaths in a Baghdad market was the result of a malfunctioning Iraqi missile, not a coalition one. He said nothing about the second, in which far more people died. After he had spoken, news came through that will only fuel the controversy ­ that at least 11 civilians had died in a coalition air raid in the Hillah area, south of Baghdad. Nine of those killed were children. Hospital staff said as many as 33 civilians died.

In the capital, bombing continued all day. Though not as relentless as in previous days, its prestige targets included a compound on the banks of the Tigris used by President Saddam and his younger son, Qusay, and the Iraqi National Olympic Committee, the base of his other son, Uday. Flames, tiles and roofing materials were seen shooting into the air as the bombs hit. Perhaps just as significantly, more telephone exchanges were hit.

For all that, Iraqi officials seemed confident. In the morning, they denied that member's of President Saddam's close family had fled abroad. "Iraqi ministers," said the BBC correspondent Rageh Omaar "feel they have given a good account of themselves and that it has not been a military walkover by coalition forces."

Later, British forces admitted that their positions in southern Iraq had come under attack from short-range missiles ­ the first time missiles have been aimed at targets inside Iraq rather than Kuwait.

And the television channel al-Jazeera reported that the Iraqis had foiled a "landing attempt" by British forces at Khirbat al-Wa'r village in northern Iraq, west of Mosul. The station showed pictures of captured British vehicles, and later of military equipment, which seemed to have come from some sort of special forces operation that appeared to have gone wrong.

Later in the day, a message was read out purporting to be from President Saddam. It urged Iraqis to "hit them, fight them. They are the evil aggressors. Fight them everywhere."

But the focus of military attention was on the three divisions of Iraq's elite troops, the Republican Guard, positioned south of Baghdad. Early reports said that the previous day's fierce fighting around Hindiyah, between Karbala and Hillah, was continuing. A second column of US Marines was on the move along the country's main highway to within 70 miles of Baghdad and drawing only minimal resistance. The convoy, including dozens of tanks and some 14,000 troops, had begun its journey in the desert and ended 40 miles away, along the newly formed front lines from which Iraqi soldiers had retreated hours before.

"We're in bad guy country," Colonel John Pomfret said, surveying this newly captured piece of territory. "I like it." Reports were coming in of a third column of 6,000-plus men preparing for the final push on the capital. And the Pentagon claimed to have captured half a dozen generals, gleaning useful information on troop movements even if nothing was learned about Iraq's arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, assuming it exists.

As the day progressed, the battle for Baghdad appeared to be finally under way. US troops moved from Hindiyah to take a main bridge over the Euphrates. US Marines were reported to have joined battle with a second division of Republican Guards dug in around the southern approaches. At Central Command in Qatar, American officials seemed to be upping the temperature with an anonymous briefing which said that the US was prepared to pay "a very high price" in casualties to take Baghdad. A figure of 1,000 possible casualties was mentioned.

What will happen now is unclear. Military strategists said that the main thrust to Baghdad might come through the so-called Karbala gap between the Euphrates and a large lake to the west. This would bring them to the south-west of the capital and the prospect of a bloody battle.

Much speculation also surrounded the success of the past days' relentless bombardment of the Republican Guard's Medina Division. The fact that the Iraqis have apparently moved armoured forces from the Guard's Nebuchadnezzar Division, which had been protecting the north of the capital, to support their Medina comrades suggested, American commanders said, that the air assaults had weakened the Medina Division. Some suggested the Iraqi forces had been "degraded" by as much as 50 per cent. Others warned that the loyalist troops had been broken into small groups and that many of the targets might have been decoys, leaving the main force untouched (as was the case with Serb tanks during the air bombing in Kosovo).

What was clear was that Allied forces were consolidating elsewhere in Iraq. Near Kut on the south-eastern flank of the coalition's three-pronged advance, US helicopters strafed the countryside to destroy mortar positions hidden in onion fields. At one spot, US troops found a drainage ditch that had been abandoned so hurriedly by Iraqi soldiers that they left behind their boots, stuck in mud.

Around Basra, British forces continued their slow encirclement. Though the British now control the south, north and west of Basra, the east remains open to the Iraqis. One officer has described the operation by his forces as "nibbling at the edges". Women, children and the elderly are steadily leaving as the commandos wait for the order to take Basra.

That they still wait is not the only evidence of continuing resistance. Massive supply convoys are now on the road from Kuwait to the front line around Baghdad. Some lines stretch for two or three miles, and ambushes are a continuing hazard. One was attacked from civilian vehicles ­ a white pick-up truck and what US Marines say looked like a taxi. Such guerrilla attackers are operating from deep inside urban areas.

Some parts of southern Iraq are now secure. The hot-spot of Nasiriyah was quiet yesterday. US Marines destroyed two T-55 tanks near a bridge over the Euphrates in the centre of the city but, apart from that, US troops concerned themselves with the large queues waiting to get supplies from coalition troops.

Things were quiet too in the rest of the British-controlled areas. So much so that troops in Umm Qasr, Zubayr, Rumaila and Safwan took off their helmets and donned berets instead, in order to appear more friendly.

If the battle for Baghdad had begun in earnest, that did not mean the political infighting ceased back in the US. President Bush insisted he had complete faith in his Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, despite growing reports of complaints in the ranks that Mr Rumsfeld had planned the war "on the cheap". Mr Rumsfeld, in turn, sought to scotch rumours that the US was in surrender talks. Only unconditional surrender, he insisted, would bring the war to an end.

Meanwhile, Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, arrived in Turkey trying to find an "accommodation" that would grant US forces greater access from the north. On Wall Street shares were volatile as investors continued to worry how long the conflict might last. If the war was going better it was far from going smoothly.