A soldier wounded in a grenade attack at a 101st Airborne Division base in Kuwait has died, according to a CNN report this afternoon. He is the first American soldier killed in a camp incident of the o­n-going war o­n Iraq.

The report also said another soldier attached to the division is being questioned in connection with the fatal grenade and small arms attack early Sunday at the camp in northern Kuwait.

According to Army V Corps spokesman Max Blumenfeld. US military officials said 12 soldiers were wounded, at least five of them seriously.

Reuters reported the US armored column pushed more than half-way to the Iraqi capital as part of a ferocious o­nslaught aimed at ousting President Saddam Hussein.

The news wire said US-British forces that launched its war o­n Iraq o­n Thursday waged round-the-clock bomb and missile attacks o­n Baghdad while ground forces invading from Kuwait seized the key southern port of Umm Qasr and advanced close to the Shi'ite holy city of Najaf, just 100 miles south of the capital.

The Washington Post Foreign Service reported that the American invasion prompted hundreds of Iraqi soldiers to surrender and thousands of others to shed their uniforms and head home.

It quoted Gen Tommy R. Franks, the overall commander of US forces in Iraq, who boasted in a briefing that the military campaign will be "unlike any other in history."

Tense standoff

The Army's 3rd Infantry Division, which has been barreling through the desert in southwestern Iraq with M1 Abrams tanks and M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles since Thursday, had pierced 150 miles into Iraq by nighfall, the report said.

Manwhile, AFP reported that Kurdish troops inside northern Iraq were in a tense standoff with Turkish forces late yesterday after Ankara deployed tanks and commandos at least 24km south of its border with Iraq.

Kurdish troops at a garrison in the small town of Vamerni watched as Turkish forces with tanks and armoured personnel carriers prepared for the arrival of reinforcements, said Telegraph journalist Damien McElroy in a report from the scene.

"We were told to expect the Turkish troops to arrive," the paper quoted First Lieutenant Mohammed Tahir as saying.

Meanwhile, an alternative news website o­n US war against terrorism, Jihad Unspun, reported an unspecified number of British soldiers have surrendered in a small town near Nasiriyadh in southern Iraq.

The website quoted Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf as saying yesterday that the media accounts by the US-led coalition were "misleading" and "lies" as Iraqi forces were still engaged in fighting with invading troops in and around Umm Qasr.

Large coalition casualties

It said the front line of the coalition forces were stopped by resistance from Iraqi soldiers.

There was a large number of casualties o­n the side of the US-led forces, Mohammed Saeed was quoted as saying.

The minister also claimed that the Iraqi soldiers were still in position and fighting in the strategic Faw peninsula.

The website said the Iraqi forces have also destroyed five enemy tanks and a number of military vehicles in fighting near Nasiriyadh, 360 kilometers to the south of Baghdad.

The British soldiers who have surrendered are kept with the local tribal families in the small town, according to the Iraqi minister.