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BAGHDAD, Sunday (Reuters)- U.S. troops dug in south of Baghdad on Sunday, preparing to wait for weeks before resuming their advance on Saddam Hussein's heavily defended capital.

But as American warplanes, missiles and artillery pounded Iraqi Republican Guard positions around the city, General Tommy Franks insisted the U.S. and British invasion to overthrow the president was "on plan" and there was no "operational pause".

U.S. officers and soldiers in some units in the field south of Baghdad - some are just 100 km (60 miles) away - told Reuters they had orders to dig in for at least two weeks to give U.S. airpower and artillery a chance to grind down its defences. Failure to break into the southern city of Basra after a week's siege may also have forced a rethink of military plans.

Franks, briefing the media at his Qatar headquarters, said, however, the war in the air and on the ground would continue its "remarkable" progress. He denied any pause and said infantry reinforcements heading for Kuwait were all part of his plan. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in Washington: "We have no plans for pauses or ceasefires."

Franks was asked if the 11-day-old war, which the U.S. vice-president said would last "weeks not months", could now stretch into summer; he would say only: "One never knows."

His boss in Washington, General Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the hardest part was yet to come and warned patience was required: "We can afford to take our time and set the conditions on the battlefield, whether that battlefield is the Republican Guard divisions now arrayed south of Baghdad, or whether those conditions are in Baghdad proper," Myers told the BBC.

Financial investors and world oil markets have been anxious to see the disruption to business and costs of the war kept in check. A long battle for Baghdad could hurt the world economy.

Saddam has vowed to make a bloody stand and inflict huge losses on the American and British invaders in street fighting.

An Iraqi military spokesman, hailing Saturday's suicide bomb that killed four American soldiers, said 4,000 willing "martyrs" from across the Arab world were already in Baghdad to fight.

Saddam has appealed to fellow Muslims to wage a jihad, or holy war, against the Americans and their allies - the sort of possibility that persuaded many of U.S. President George W. Bush's allies to argue that war would provoke wider violence. In Baghdad, the air and artillery bombardment was at its fiercest on Saturday and Sunday, with targets struck both in the centre and on the southern outskirts.

Air raid sirens keened across the city and black smoke from oil trenches, set alight to thwart U.S. air raids, blanketed the sky. U.S. officials said their forces had bombed a training site for paramilitary Fedayeen, a presidential palace, intelligence complex and surface-to-air missile sites in Baghdad.

U.S. forces just north of Najaf, 160 km (100 miles) south of Baghdad, shelled and mortared Iraqi troops near a bridge over the Euphrates river overnight. Near Kerbala, American rockets and artillery also targeted Iraqi Republican Guard positions. A Reuters correspondent watched soldiers dig deeper trenches and lay mines around their camp in central Iraq: "It looks like they are going to be in this position for at least two weeks," the correspondent quoted a sergeant as saying.

"They're going to send in the aircraft to do the work before the grunts (infantry) go in," the sergeant said.

Supply lines running 350 km (200 miles) back to Kuwait are stretched - rations are short at the front - and vulnerable to guerrillas, as Saturday's suicide bomb showed. Even in friendly Kuwait, an attacker drove a truck at soldiers on Sunday, injuring as many as 15 troops who had been lining up at a shop.

U.S. reinforcements are on the way - 100,000 to add to the 125,000 already in Iraq, Washington officials said last week. The Fourth Infantry Division, blocked from opening a planned northern front by Turkish obstruction, is sailing toward Kuwait.

At least 36 U.S. soldiers have been killed since the war began, 104 were wounded, seven taken prisoner and 17 missing.

The official British death toll is 23, only four in combat and the rest in accidents. Australian Defence Minister Robert Hill estimated Iraqi combat casualties were in the thousands. Iraq says nearly 600 civilians have died since March 20.

Seeking to counter criticism of the U.S. war effort by military analysts and the media, officials from Bush downwards began emphasising the harshness of Saddam's rule and defending their tactics against suggestions they under-estimated Iraq.

While American and British public opinion has swung behind their forces, international protests continued over the weekend.

On Sunday, 100,000 marched in Jakarta, Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation. And 150,000 joined India's biggest anti-war protest to date.

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