One Conflict, Many Fronts

As U.S. forces pushed to surround and began to subdue Baghdad, the lives of allied and Iraqi troops alike were on the line not only there but in less prominently cited arenas of the conflict. In southern Iraq, British troops were said to have taken an industrial park in Basra where Iraqi fighters had put up stubborn resistance. In the nation’s northeast, Kurdish fighters were joined in battle by American soldiers during an advance toward the strategically important, oil-rich city of Mosul. “The regime has been weakened, to be sure, but it is still lethal,” Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said of Iraq, and the war’s dangers are underscored in photographs from varying locales.