London, March 25 (Bloomberg) -- Allied forces are now as close as 50 miles (80 kilometers) to Baghdad and the Iraq war strategy is unfolding according to plan, Prime Minister Tony Blair said. ``The progress on the way to Baghdad has been exactly what we planned and what we anticipated,'' Blair said at a press conference. U.S. and U.K. forces battled Republican Guard units near the capital as the campaign to oust Saddam Hussein's regime and disarm Iraq entered a sixth day. British troops also fought irregular units in the southern city of Basra, officials said. Control of cities in the south is vital so that the allies can supply armored columns advancing on Baghdad.
Blair said coalition troops are on guard against any Iraqi use of chemical weapons. CBS News reported yesterday that the Iraqi government had authorized troops defending the capital to use chemical weapons once the coalition army crossed a certain point. The network cited unidentified U.S. officials. The war in Iraq won't be over soon, Air Marshall Brian Burridge, the commander of U.K. armed forces in the Persian Gulf, said. While troops are encountering resistance at Basra, he said on British Broadcasting Corp.'s Radio 4 Today program that it would be ``wrong to call it serious resistance.'' Blair said he will meet with President George W. Bush tomorrow near Washington and will urge the president to give the UN a leading role in planning the reconstruction of Iraq when the conflict ends.
Clearing Mines
British forces are working to clear mines from a deep-water port in Iraq so that a ship carrying food and medicine for Iraq can land, Blair said. Engineers started work on a pipeline from Kuwait that will bring safe drinking water into Iraq. U.K. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told Parliament that coalition forces are making ``steady progress.'' Straw said he couldn't indicate when the war would end. Burridge said the coalition's current objective is the defeat of the Republican Guard. An Iraqi suicide bomber destroyed an allied tank in the Al- Faw peninsula, Iraqi Major General Hazem al-Rawai said at a press conference broadcast by the Qatar television channel Al-Jazeera.
Iraq is attempting to control allegiance to Hussein's regime by dispersing the president's Fedayeen paramilitary militia throughout units of the regular army, U.S. Major General Stanley McChrystal said in Washington yesterday. Soldiers also are fighting for control of An Nasiriyah, a city 185 miles south of the capital with bridges over the Euphrates River. Arab volunteers are arriving in Iraq to help battle U.S. and U.K. forces, Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan said, as he called for the Arab world to use its oil as a weapon against the allies. Ramadan, in a news conference aired by Al-Jazeera, condemned Arab states for not taking action to end the ``aggression'' against Iraq. /www.quote.bloomberg.com