4-16-2003 Wednesday

4-16-2003 Wednesday

Night search
Lighted by the taillight of a Bradley fighting vehicle and a full moon, U.S. Army Spc. Juan Herrera, 20, from San Antonio, Texas, helps secure a road as two squads of soldiers from A Company, 4th Battalion, 7th Infantry Regiment search a hospital in Baghdad, Iraq, on Wednesday. They found the hospital empty, looted and burned.

Into plowshares?
A pile of Kalashnikov automatic rifles burns at Salah Al-Deen Military Hospital in the northern Iraqi town of Tikrit on Wednesday. U.S. Marines found and destroyed a huge arms cache consisting of thousands o 11111k103l f rifles, ammunition and mines at the hospital in Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's hometown.

New lesson plan
A U.S. Marine pulls down a picture of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein at a school in Kut, Iraq, on Wednesday. A team of Marines, Army and special operations troops went to schools and other facilities in Kut looking for weapons caches and unexploded ordnance.

Initial reaction
Spc. Richard Heglund of Wilmington, Del., of Bravo Company, 3rd Battalion, 187th Regiment of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division, writes "USA" on the hands of a crowd of Iraqi children in Baghdad on Wednesday.

War wounds
U.S. Marine Cpl. David McCallen, 23, shows his broken teeth during a press conference Wednesday at the U.S. military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. McCallen was wounded during a suicide bomb attack in Baghdad.

Desolation
Iraqi women carry non-potable water home Wednesday through a sandstorm in the outskirts of Basra. Much of Iraq's second largest city has been without potable water for more than two weeks.

Newly homeless
Sadi Qader Muhamad, right, a Shiite Arab, weeps Wednesday as she stands in front of her home, which was seized by Kurds in recent days in Kirkuk, Iraq.

Franks in Baghdad
U.S. Army Gen. Tommy Franks walks through rubble where a Tomahawk cruise missile destroyed a portion of one of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's many presidential palaces. Franks is overall commander of coalition forces in Iraq.

Scolding the Iraqi army
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, arrives Wednesday to deliver a speech in Tehran next to a picture of the late Ayatollah Khomeini. Khamenei said the failure of the Iraqi Republican Guard to resist coalition forces would remain "an eternal disgrace," Iranian television reported. "The world always pays tribute to defenders who resist, even if they are defeated by the enemy, but is ashamed of their humiliating surrender," Khameini said.

Looters caught
U.S. Marines detain Iraqis who had been looting a Baghdad bank on Wednesday. The soldiers searched the bank and the men, treated some of their wounds and then let some go.

Overwrought
An Iraqi Shiite pilgrim who collapsed from exhaustion is carried out of the Imam Hussein holy shrine in the southern Iraqi city of Karbala on Wednesday. For the first time in decades, Shiite Muslims in Iraq are able to gather in the Shiite holy city of Karbala to mark the end of the 40-day mourning of the death of one of the most important figures in their religion, Imam Hussein, in the year 680. During the rule of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, such rituals were banned.

Guns by the truckload
U.S. Marines load some of the 50,000 weapons that they found at a military hospital in Tikrit, Iraq, onto a flatbed truck Wednesday, two days after the city, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's hometown, fell to coalition forces.

Tears for the fallen
Staff Sgt. Lonnie Roberts cries Wednesday in Baghdad at a memorial service for PV2 Gregory R. Huxley Jr., 19, of Forest Port, N.Y., who was killed in action April 6 when the armored personnel carrier he was riding in was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. Huxley had finished basic training five months earlier. Roberts was his squad leader and was riding in the carrier at the time of the incident. He is a member of 317 Engineer Battalion, 2nd Platoon Bravo Company.

Messy aftermath
A former employee of the Iraqi Ministry of Health looks at paper strewn outside the building Wednesday in Baghdad, Iraq. Thousands of public employees went back to work Sunday in Baghdad, hoping for normalcy, but found many of their offices charred and looted.