UK troops push into Iraq, crash kills 8 British soldiers
( 2003-03-21 20:36 ) (7 )

Britain suffered its first military losses on Friday just hours into the allied assault to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, but Tony Blair's government insisted the campaign was progressing "extremely well."

Eight British soldiers and four US airmen were killed in a helicopter crash on the Iraqi border, the first known allied casualties of the war, a British military spokesman said.

But Defense Minister Geoff Hoon said that while the allied push north was meeting stiff opposition in some places, and Iraq had set ablaze up to 30 oil wells, several strategic points had been captured.

News of the casualties briefly depressed the pound early on Friday in London but the stock market took heart at the overall good progress of the campaign.

Newspapers rallied behind Blair but although public opinion against the war appears to be softening, more street protests were expected in the run-up to a major rally on Saturday.

"This is a campaign that is inevitably...working out slightly differently from the plans that were drawn up initially," Hoon told the BBC.

"But nevertheless it is going extremely well. Allied forces are pushing north on at least two fronts now."

The eight dead British troops had been part of the air and seaborne assault on the strategic Faw peninsula in southern Iraq on the way north to size Iraq's only port of Basra.

"They secured the strategically very significant peninsula of al Faw," Hoon earlier told Channel 4 News.

But he said initially light opposition had stiffened considerably with the push north.

"Our forces are in fact already facing some stern resistance around Umm Qasr as I speak. The Iraqis are not simply giving up in the way some commentators suggested that they would."

BLAIR'S UNITY APPEAL

Blair returns on Friday after what Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said had been difficult discussions at a European summit.

Relations with France especially have plumbed new depths due to French President Jacques Chirac's opposition to the war.

"Britain has never been a nation to hide at the back and even if we were, it wouldn't avail us," a stern-faced Blair said in a televised address recorded before he left for Brussels on Thursday.

Blair, who has sent British troops into action in Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan in six years in office, appealed for unity over Iraq in the face of unprecedented resistance from the public and within his traditionally anti-war Labour Party.

"My judgment, as prime minister, is that this threat is real, growing and of an entirely different nature to any conventional threat to our security that Britain has faced before," he said.

British newspapers nearly all backed him.

"Blair's case for conflict is compelling in its logic. If we did nothing, the terrorists would use weapons from rogue states like Iraq to destroy our way of life," the tabloid Sun said.

The Daily Telegraph added: "The simple, unadorned patriotism of the Prime Minister's broadcast will have reassured the country that our forces are not being committed in an unworthy cause."

An opinion poll in the same newspaper showed public opinion slowly swinging behind the Anglo-American assault, with 53 percent supporting it against 50 percent three days ago.

(Reuters)