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News :: International Relations |
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Resistance Raises Fears For The Endgame |
Current rating: 0 |
by Julian Borger in Washington and Richard Norton-Taylor
(No verified email address) |
24 Mar 2003
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Rapid campaign hit by unexpectedly fierce battles |
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CELEBRATING US LOSSES, NOT LIBERATION
Iraqis celebrate near an Apache military helicopter in the Hindiya district, 120 km south-west of Baghdad, March 24, 2003. Iraq said on Monday that Iraqi farmers had shot down two U.S. helicopters south of Baghdad and vowed to show the pilots on television, just as it did with other captured and killed soldiers on Sunday. A U.S. defense official in Washington confirmed that one Apache Longbow helicopter was down in Iraq. He made no comment on the Iraqi claims that a second attack helicopter had been brought down and had no information on the fate of the pilots. REUTERS/Faleh Kheiber
The appearance of US prisoners of war on Middle Eastern television came as a nasty morning shock to a nation that was unprepared for such reversals, and a clear omen that the battle for Iraq is not going to be as straightforward as some of the more optimistic hawks had predicted.
US and British officers had warned that the battle could be a great deal harder than their more ideological civilian colleagues were suggesting. But even they thought the regular Iraqi army would collapse and the main threat would come from the leadership carrying out dramatic destructive gestures involving blowing up oil fields or using weapons of mass destruction.
So far it has been the other way round. There has been no sign of chemical or biological weapons, while British and US marines managed to seize most of the southern oilfields with only a handful of well-heads having been set ablaze.
Many of the key bridges over the Euphrates have also been captured by US forces before they could be destroyed.
If Baghdad had planned a scorched-earth policy, it has evidently not worked so far. But groups of Iraqi soldiers have been prepared to do something that was not expected of them - fight to the death.
At the start of the war British defence officials raised expectations of a "rapid and decisive" campaign with the "minimum use of force". Yesterday, the British defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, was still presenting a confident picture, saying "pockets of resistance" could be bypassed if they posed no threat to coalition forces "in the expectation that the regime will collapse".
Some of these pockets, however, have stood in the way of the advance. According to reports from journalists travelling with US and British troops, Iraqi soldiers stalled the coalition assault on the cities of Basra, Nassiriya and Najaf. The reported surrender of a whole division, perhaps two, of Iraqi troops late last week now appears to have been overly optimistic. Some senior officers and about 2,000 troops are said to have surrendered. But some Iraqi soldiers, a few in civilian clothing, seem to have made apparently independent decisions to fight on.
The British 7th Armoured Brigade, the Desert Rats, was involved in a difficult pitched battle yesterday with Iraqi troops defending Basra, the Shia-majority city in south-eastern Iraq which coalition military commanders hoped would fall almost instantly providing television pictures of the downtrodden Shia welcoming the invading forces as liberators.
Stiff resistance
US marines were reported to have stopped their Baghdad offensive at Nassiriya. From 20 miles south-east of the city, Sean Maguire, the Reuters journalist with the marines, reported: "We're blocked. We can't go ahead because of security concerns because of this resistance."
Meanwhile, the 3rd Infantry Division, spearheading the main armoured offensive on Baghdad through the western desert, met its first real resistance at the Shia holy city of Najaf. Even at Umm Qasr, the Iraqi oil port on the Kuwaiti border that was one of the first objectives of the ground war, heavy fighting was still being reported yesterday, three days after British and US marines launched the attack.
To some extent the patchy but tenacious resistance appears to be the result of an Iraqi leadership decision to send units of the Republican Guard to bolster troops in the more remote outposts in the south, rather than reserve all the elite troops for a last stand in Baghdad and Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's home town.
These Republican Guard units are there "to put some backbone into the troops", as Air Marshal Burridge, the commander of the British forces in Iraq, put it.
That resolve may have been toughened still further by the presence of intelligence officers to exhort and even threaten the half-hearted.
Iraqi foot soldiers captured around Basra have told British military intelligence that they had tried to surrender on Friday but had been rounded up by the Special Security Organisation run by President Saddam's son, Qusay, and forced at gunpoint to return to the front line. They also claimed they were told their families would be killed if they failed to fight, and were handed a large amount of cash.
But initial reports from the battlefield suggest that there is another factor at work - one that Pentagon planners had not accounted for. They had been assured by Iraqi exiles that the army, including the Republican Guard, hated President Saddam and would not fight. That assessment now looks a half-truth.
The captured or deserting soldiers interviewed by western journalists so far clearly do detest the Iraqi dictator but are less than overjoyed to see US and British soldiers rolling across their country. One Iraqi PoW told a New York Times reporter that President Saddam had been such a disaster for his country that he must be an American agent.
Those Iraqi exiles who do not have a vested interest as members of one of the political groups vying for post-Saddam power have been saying for years that a largely secular Iraqi nationalism exists and may emerge as a potent force during and after the war. The positive side of that message, which the Washington hawks seized on, was that Iraq - despite its youth as a country and arbitrary ethnic mix - possesses a powerful glue that will help keep the country together once President Saddam goes. The negative side, from Washington and London's point of view, is that individual Iraqi soldiers could be ready to die for their country, and the wider Arab world, and in some cases Islam, even if they have only contempt for the Ba'ath party regime.
This does not augur well for coalition troops if the endgame is to be played out in Baghdad. It suggests that resistance could be mounted by far more Iraqis than a few Ba'ath party members who have no future after the fall of the dictator. It could include those who believe that the forcible entry of western soldiers into Baghdad would be an affront to their national pride.
Asked if the battle for Baghdad could be street by street, Mr Hoon said yesterday: "It could be." He added: "We've known all along that Saddam Hussein has issued orders to defend Baghdad."
Nor is it necessarily reassuring that no chemical or biological weapons have so far been used. Even if such weapons are available to President Saddam, to use them now risks uniting world opinion against him, at a time when he has the best opportunity in a decade to muster sympathy. It is better for him, for the time being, for the international coverage to focus on civilian casualties of the fighting.
However, it is still quite possible that once that and every other weapon has been exhausted, he may yet reach for the self-destruct button. "We do not know what kind of trip wires might be tripped once we get closer to Baghdad. He might then decide to use chemical, biological weapons," Mr Hoon said.
For months before the war, military commanders had worried that the civilians sending them into battle had been carried away by their own wishful thinking into imagining the war would be a "walk in the park".
The officers feared it would be a much nastier affair, and talked gloomily about worst-case scenarios involving guerrilla warfare even after Baghdad has fallen. The reality so far has fallen somewhere between the best and worst, but the war is less than half won.
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/
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Setbacks For US, UK Lift Iraqi Spirits |
by John Daniszewski, LA Times
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
24 Mar 2003
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BAGHDAD, Iraq, 25 March 2003 — As US and British forces suffered their first setbacks on the battlefield Sunday, officials and fighters in Iraq took heart and asserted with fresh conviction that the United States would be bogged down and defeated by their steadfast resistance.
"I knew it before, but today I know it for sure: They will never reach Baghdad," city policeman Muayad Shumari said.
After enduring three days of devastating bombings and reports of rapid US and British advances in the south, with no notable Iraqi successes, Iraqi officials at last felt they had a few things to brag about.
At Umm Qasr, a city thought to have been subdued three days ago, Iraqi resistance suddenly sprang back to life. And after a sharp battle at Nassiriyah, a key crossing on the Euphrates River, Iraq was able to broadcast images of five American captives and grisly photographs of slain US troops. Iraq claimed that about 25 allied soldiers were killed.
In central Baghdad, when word spread that a British plane may have been shot down, authorities and members of the public searched in a frenzy, believing that two pilots had ejected and were hiding in reeds next to the Tigris River.
In addition, the accidental downing of a British jet by a US Patriot missile, the grenade attack on US troops by an American serviceman in Kuwait and the continuing anti-war demonstrations abroad all were taken as good omens here.
In addition to state-controlled television reports on the developments, three senior officials — the information minister, the defense minister and the vice president — all gave news conferences in which they praised the country’s armed forces and militias and accused the United States and Britain of lying about military successes.
On the streets, loyalists of President Saddam Hussein echoed the upbeat mood. They spoke as if a humiliating defeat of the US military superpower was just around the corner, even while US bombs and missiles continued to fall on this capital city and US troops moved to within 100 miles.
"They made a mistake coming here to fight a people who have faith and who are not afraid to die," said Ahmed Aziz Ahmed, a 38-year-old grocer-turned-Baath Party militiaman who added he can’t wait for his chance to confront US and British invaders.
“They think that they can kill Saddam Hussein and rule us,’’ he said with a laugh. "But we are all Saddam Husseins."
Speaking to a large assembly of journalists Sunday night, Defense Minister Sultan Hashim Ahmad Jabburi Tai gave a view of the war quite opposite to military briefings from the US and British sides.
Iraq continued to hold all the main cities in the south of the country and had kept the US and British forces bottled up at the port of Umm Qasr and on the southern Al Faw Peninsula, the minister said.
Attempts to take Basra and Nassiriyah had failed and numerous enemy tanks and armored vehicles had been destroyed, he continued.
And he could not even specify the number of POWs Iraq had collected, he said, because they were still being held and counted after the various engagements.
Sultan acknowledged that US and British forces had moved as far north as Najaf, within striking distance of Baghdad, but said that was only because they kept avoiding battles with the Iraqi troops and instead are racing through the empty desert.
"In the end, wherever will they go? They will have to come to the cities if they want to achieve their objectives," he said. And when they do, he said, they will be surprised by the Iraqis’ "endurance and will to fight and resolve to protect the country."
A European diplomat sympathetic to the Iraqis, speaking on the basis of anonymity, said the Iraqis seem to be digging in for the long haul, and US military planners may at last be sobering up to the reality of the country’s tenacity and commitment to fight.
"The Americans expected no serious resistance from the Iraqi Army. They expected a Shiite rebellion in the south. They expected to be met with flowers in Basra as liberators. None of these expectations have materialized," said the diplomat. "It looks as if the Americans are beginning to realize that this war will last longer than planned."
The Iraqi government, meanwhile, has been driving home a message that the war is a matter of patriotism and Islam, rather than being about weapons of mass destruction or removing Saddam from power.
For many Iraqis, the allied military victory is not the foregone conclusion here that it is in the West.
While acknowledging US and British superiority in weaponry and air power, they continue to believe that they will win because they have justice and their Islamic faith on their side. They argue that they are defending their own soil and that the foreign soldiers coming here are not as committed to a struggle and will not understand the country or its people and their will to avoid US domination.
"It is easy for us to fight, because we know what we are fighting for. What are they fighting for — Bush?" said Shumari, 28. Dressed in a blue police robe and a camouflage helmet, he was guarding an intersection in downtown Baghdad. |
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