Press reports from Iraq speak of a surprise attack launched by Iraq during a howling sandstorm that engulfed the country on Tuesday but details are sketchy. In Washington, a Pentagon official said on Tuesday that up to 300 Iraqis forces were believed killed when they attacked the U.S. Seventh Cavalry near the town of Najaf, about 100 miles south of Baghdad.

The official who admitted that the attackers damaged a number of the Cavalry pieces said there were no reports of American casualties in the ground engagement in which Iraqi forces fired on U.S. troops with rocket propelled grenades.

If confirmed, the initial reports of fighting near An Najaf would make it the biggest ground clash of the war, as well as the first encounter between advancing American infantry and the Iraqi units guarding the approach to Saddam's seat of power.

A senior military official said the U.S. troops had hunkered down against a sandstorm when Iraqis - either Republican Guard or paramilitary Iraqi troops traveling on foot - opened fire with rocket-propelled grenades.

The unit is part of the Army force driving on Baghdad. Some elements of the force are farther north, near Karbala, with only the Medina armored division of the Republican Guard between them and Baghdad.

Baghdad Hit By a New Series of Blasts

A series of explosions along with the sound of low flying aircraft was heard early Wednesday, and Iraqi Satellite TV's signal went off the air.

Smoke was seen next to the information ministry and the Iraqi TV building.

Iraq's domestic television service was not broadcasting at the time.

U.S. military officials have said in the past that Iraqi television was a legitimate military target, since cutting communications links between Saddam and the Iraqi people and his military was an important goal of the campaign

US Public's Confidence in War Success Drops

Meanwhile, and according to a poll by the Pew Research Center, images of battered American POWs, a downed Apache helicopter and U.S. fatalities in Iraq have had a dramatic impact on the public's perception of the war. Just 38 percent said the conflict was going well on Monday, down from 71 percent last Friday,

A fresh sampling of 1,495 was taken each day. The poll had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

*Other Key Developments Concerning Iraq

* _ Sandstorms slowed U.S. and British forces to a crawl and thwarted air missions Tuesday as U.S.-led forces edged closer to Baghdad. In the south, British forces captured a senior Iraqi official and killed 20 fighters.

* _ Turkey will send forces up to 12 miles into northern Iraq to stop refugees, but only if a crisis situation develops, Turkey's foreign minister said.

* _ U.S. war strategists are proceeding on the assumption Saddam Hussein is alive even though information on his fate remains inconclusive, Bush administration officials said Tuesday.

* _ President Bush, seeking dlrs 74.7 billion as a down payment for war in Iraq, said coalition forces are "on a steady advance" but that he could not predict how long the fighting will last, but stressed "we know its outcome: We will prevail."

* _ Coalition forces have captured nearly 4,000 Iraqi prisoners as of Tuesday night, a senior Pentagon official said.

* _ Two British soldiers were killed in a "friendly fire" incident with a British tank near Basra in southern Iraq, a military commander said Tuesday.

* _ The United Nations Security Council scheduled an emergency meeting for Wednesday after Arab and nonaligned nations demanded an open meeting to express their opposition to the U.S.-led war on Iraq.

* _ With food dwindling for millions of Iraqis, a U.N. aid agency will make its biggest single request for cash - more than dlrs1 billion to help feed the war-stricken nation for about six months.

* _ Eleven of the 20 U.S. military personnel who had died in Iraq by Tuesday were Marines who were stationed at Camp Lejeune, N.C. Most were killed in an ambush near An Nasiriyah, the Pentagon said.

* _ Two planes from the Gulf brought 27 U.S. injured soldiers to a military hospital in Germany on Tuesday, including five who were wounded in Iraq.

* In the north, Saddam Hussein's troops laid mines ahead of a possible assault from the north. But the attack may never come - or at least not with the level of U.S. firepower originally anticipated. U.S. military officials originally wanted to move up to 60,000 troops into the Kurdish area for a push toward Baghdad from the north. But the Turkish parliament refused to allow U.S. troops to use Turkey as a staging ground.

* US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Tuesday intelligence information indicated Iraqi troops may use chemical weapons against U.S.-led invasion forces as they close in on Baghdad, although he did not know how accurate the information was.


PHOTO CAPTION

Heavy U.S. Army engineering equipment is guided by a soldier as an Iraqi desert storm turns the daylight orange in north of the city of Najaf March 24, 2003. (Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters)