Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, February 26, 1991                   TAG: 9102260456
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: EVENING 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

ALLIES CUT OFF RETREAT/ U.S. TROOPS CONFRONT REPUBLICAN GUARD

"We are poised to prevent any withdrawal to Baghdad," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

He described the swift pace of the U.S. VII Corps of tanks and other armored forces deep into Iraq, with elements poised along the Euphrates River to block Republican Guard units who apparently were attempting to retreat.

"The Republican Guard has been engaged," he said. "We have elements that far north - on the Euphrates River," which cuts across from Baghdad to the key military city of Basra.

"If they try to go back to Basra, the Air Force will kill them. If they go to the other side of the Tigris, the bridges are down. If they try to flee north to Baghdad, they'll run into the U.S. Army and if they move south into Kuwait, they run into coalition forces and the U.S. Marines," he said.

At a U.S. military briefing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Marine Brig. Gen. Richard Neal declined to give details of the battle with the Republican Guard units.

"It's too premature for me to give you actually how the engagements are going," Neal said.

"But suffice to say that they're still in a lot of the reveted positions that they have been in previously and they're fighting from those reveted positions," he said. "We're outflanking them, we're outmaneuvering them and destroying them in place."

Saddam Hussein ordered his troops Monday evening to begin a withdrawal from Kuwait, but U.S. VII Corps troops had punched through into Iraq on Sunday, advancing quickly to cut off Saddam's best-trained forces, which were positioned north and west of Kuwait just inside the border of Iraq.

The Pentagon official described the Iraqi forces in Kuwait as "attempting a fighting withdrawal," but said Army, Marine and other coalition forces were attacking them since they appeared to be withdrawing with light armored vehicles and weapons.

"They're not fighting real well by our standards, but they are fighting," he said.

The official, offering the first confirmation that U.S. forces had driven so far into the heart of Iraq, described the movement of the American and coalition forces as "relentless - round the clock" as they moved through the Iraqi desert.

The official said the Republican Guard units were fighting back, but he described the clash among tank, infantry units and artillery forces on both sides as "sporadic."

He said U.S. forces were attacking the Republican Guard units from the south and the west all along the Kuwaiti border, but that the Guard units were inside Iraq.

"We've destroyed approximately 30 T-72s in tank-to-tank encounters," the official said, describing a multi-pronged set of conflicts with the Guard that appeared to result in the destruction of top-of-the-line Soviet-made tanks.

The Guard had been pounded over the past month in air strikes designed to destroy its tanks and artillery and weaken the 150,000-strong force, which had been staying in a network of bunkers north of the northern Kuwait border.