Up to 15 Iraqis were killed in a Baghdad street market today in what furious residents said was a US missile strike, as President George W Bush praised the "lethal precision" of American pilots and warned Saddam Hussein that his day of reckoning was near.
After almost a week of unrelenting attacks on targets in and around the Iraqi capital, the missile strike in the Shaab district appeared to be the first to hit a residential area causing substantial civilian casualties.
A Reuterscorrespondents counted 15 scorched corpses lying amid blackened, mangled cars and rubble from broken buildings. Flames poured from an oil truck.
US military leaders say their aircraft were targeting Iraqi missiles less than 300ft from civilian homes as more than a dozen people were killed in a Baghdad market.
Iraqi officials claimed 14 died with 30 injured in the disaster in the northern Shaab district of the Iraqi capital.
American officials initially hinted that Saddam Hussein's own regime could have been responsible.
With a second day of severe sandstorms buffeting Iraq, US forces fought bloody skirmishes in their advance towards the city from the south.
President Bush told hundreds of troops and their families in Florida that US fighting units were facing the most desperate troops loyal to President Saddam Hussein.
"We cannot predict the final day of the Iraqi regime, but I can assure you, and I assure the long-suffering people of Iraq, there will be a day of reckoning for the Iraqi regime, and that day is drawing near," Bush said, speaking at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, which houses US Central Command.
"Our pilots and cruise missiles have struck vital military targets with lethal precision," he said.
In contrast, he said Iraqi units used cowardly and evil means. "They wage attacks while posing as civilians. They use real civilians as human shields. They pretend to surrender, then fire upon those who show them mercy," Bush said.
"Protecting innocent civilians is a central commitment of our war plan. Our enemy in this war is the Iraqi regime, not the people who have suffered under it," he declared.
South of the capital a Reuters correspondent with US Marines pushing north from Nassiriya, saw about two dozen corpses among wrecked vehicles on the road north of the town of Shatra, where the American convoy had come under small-arms fire.
In a week of fighting, U.S. troops have come to within 50 miles (80 km) of the capital.
Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf said more than 500 people had been wounded and 200 homes destroyed as US forces stormed through Nassiriya city earlier.
A US military official said some of the 12 soldiers whose supply convoy was ambushed near Nassiriya in southern Iraq on Sunday may have been killed by their captors although they tried to surrender.
The Pentagon said it was flying its high-tech 4th Infantry Division and other units totaling more than 30,000 troops to the Gulf to join the invasion of Iraq. Some commentators have said US ground troops were overstretched, especially since Iraqi resistance has been more troublesome than expected.
The British Prime Minister Tony Blair said there had been some overnight unrest in Iraq's second city of Basra in the south. "Truthfully reports are confused, but we believe there was some limited form of uprising," he told parliament.
Arab television journalists in the southern city on Wednesday said there was no sign of an anti-Saddam revolt.