Coalition warplanes bombed a building early Friday believed to be occupied by Saddam Hussein's half brother, a close adviser who allegedly helped stash billions of dollars abroad for the Iraqi leader. The attack together with a human bombing in the heart of Baghdad that reportedly killed three US marines and sporadic clashes across the capital have raised fresh doubts as to coalition forces' grip on the Iraqi capital.

Continuing Efforts to Degrade the Saddam Regime

U.S. Central Command said forces launched six satellite-guided bombs at a building near Ar Ramadi, about 60 miles west of Baghdad, in an attack on Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti.

In a statement, the military said the 1:45 a.m. attack was part of "a continuing effort to degrade the Hussein regime" and that damage assessment was ongoing.

Marine Maj. Brad Bartelt, a Central Command spokesman, said the building targeted on Friday was an intelligence service-operating site.

Al-Tikriti was allegedly the chief organizer of a clandestine group of companies and funds handling the Iraqi leader's wealth, according to the Coalition for International Justice, a nonprofit organization based in The Hague, Netherlands and Washington.

He was chief of Saddam's secret police in the 1980s and then Iraq's ambassador to U.N. offices in Geneva for nine years.
While in Geneva, he set up the Iraqi president's financial network, the organization says.

Estimates of Saddam's wealth range from dlrs 2 billion to dlrs 40 billion. But experts say it has been so effectively hidden - from Latin America to Asia - that the real amount may never be known.

Volunteers Resist US Troops in Baghdad

Twenty-one Iraqis were killed and one United States Marine was shot dead in separate firefights in Baghdad. Large numbers of non-Iraqi Arab fighters took to the streets resisting the US forces in several areas. The volunteer fighters were in control of several Baghdad streets in the Adhamiya district, where a mosque is located, and also in the nearby Waziriya district.

They were also out in force on the streets of the Mansur district west of the Tigris river, close to the Iraqi intelligence service headquarters.

US planes swooped overhead, hitting targets in areas under Arab control.

US military officials said one US Marine was killed and more than 20 wounded in the fighting near the Imam al-Adham Mosque north of the city centre and near a presidential palace.

The fighting was over.

US Marines Killed in Human Bomb Attack

A human-bomb detonated himself and killed "some" US soldiers at a military checkpoint in Baghdad on Thursday, an US officer said. Asked by reporters how many US servicemen had died in the attack, Marine officer Matt Baker told a Reuters correspondent in the Iraqi capital. "Some are dead in the attack but I don't know how many." Though the official toll was still awaited, another US soldier was quoted as saying that as many as three marines could have been killed.

US marines had already been on their edges following some earlier suicide attacks. A suicidal car bombing had killed three US soldiers at a checkpoint northwest of Baghdad on April 5.

Four US soldiers were killed in Najaf, about 160 km from the capital, in a similar attack.

PHOTO CAPTION

Iraqi army's storage warehouse containing ammunition is seen exploding in Baghdad April 10, 2003. REUTERS/Kyodo