Written - 5 April 2003
The war in Iraq is approaching its finale. Three powerful US divisions, the 3rd Mechanized, 1st Marine, and 101st Air Assault are on the outskirts of Baghdad. These US units have seized Baghdad's almost undefended international airport, and are launching armored probes along four-lane highways leading to the city center. As of now, the hugely outgunned Iraqis are still fighting back, but just barely.
Unless a military coup against the embattled regime of President Saddam Hussein occurs within the next days - the heartfelt hope of Pentagon planners - US forces will be compelled to begin urban warfare in Baghdad, a metropolis of 5 million.
Baghdad is a low, sprawling city, one of the Arab World's more modern, with few high-rise buildings and wide boulevards and streets. The capital's open urban architecture and broad thoroughfares make defense more difficult, allows for movement of tanks and armored vehicles, and will permit invading US forces to chop the city up in sections for easier assault.
Extensive aerial mapping of Baghdad and suburbs will lessen the chances that attacking US units will become lost.
Many residences are walled villas, which are far from ideal as defensive positions. The best urban defensive positions are large ruined residential and industrial buildings with extensive cellars, and old areas with narrow warrens of streets.
Over the past three days, US forces have advanced 140km to Baghdad, encountering little resistance around Kut, a choke point where in 1916 the Turks defeated an earlier invading British army; or in the strategic gap between Kerbala and Baghdad's outskirts. The decisive battle US commanders expected with 3-4 Iraqi Republican Guard divisions before Baghdad did not occur - only a series of sharp skirmishes in which Iraq lost a few hundred troops and about 40 tanks.
It appears regular Iraq units swiftly pulled back into the shelter of Baghdad rather than stay forward of the city and face annihilation in the open by the omnipotent US Air Force. No troops on earth could withstand days of pounding by heavy B-52 and B-1 bombers, and strike aircraft using precision munitions, fuel air explosive, wide-area anti-armor weapons, lethal ATCAMS tactical missiles, MRLS rocket batteries, and a deluge of 155mm artillery shells, some with `bus' rounds packed with anti-vehicle/anti-personnel submunitions.
In spite of the crushing superiority of US forces, the Iraqi Army managed to mount a number of sharp local counter-attacks. Many were delivered without proper coordination with neighboring units or supporting artillery, and all were mauled by US warplanes and helicopter gunships. But these bravely delivered arracks were evidence that Iraqi forces still retained élan and some limited combat capability. Their ability to continue fighting under 24/7 air attack, cut off from their bases, low on supplies, and without medical aid, remains uncertain. Demoralization must by now be setting in and could quickly cascade. US forces are now in central Baghdad.
Iraq's only hope of halting the US-British invasion is to turn beleaguered Baghdad and Basra into Stalingrada, as Saddam, who appeared quite live and hearty on TV in Friday, vowed. But this alone will not save Iraq from eventual surrender: as in all sieges, ammunition, food and water must eventually run out, and some Iraqi units will lay down their arms. The best way to resist a siege is to attack or harass the besieging enemy's communications (LOC's) .
The van of the US invasion force before Baghdad — the three divisions and other brigade-sized units — has left something of a vacuum in its rear. The delayed 4th Mech Divisions is currently disembarking at Kuwait Port and will head north, possibly piecemeal, beginning on 6 April, followed by a US armored cavalry regiment. Their immediate mission is to protect the invasion force's 350km supply lines back to Kuwait and to mask unconquered Iraqi cities and towns. US Special Forces and British SAS commandos have also been rushed in to guard LOC's.
The US-British deployment in Iraq resembles a mushroom with a very long stalk, with its broad head at Baghdad, and long stem running back to Kuwait. Last week, US Secretary of State Colin Powell used an address to the US Israel lobby, a primary supporter of the US-Iraq war, to threaten war against Iran and Syria, the lobby's next targets. Secretary Donald Rumsfeld echoed Powell's undiplomatic threats. Interestingly, if such a war came, a mere 140-km westward thrust by an Iranian army corps along the axis
Khorramshahr-Basra-Kuwait could cut off and isolate the entire US-British invasion force in southern Iraq.
Iraqi defenses are indeed crumbling, as the Pentagon claims. The Iraqis have dispersed their main force units into 200-man companies and will attempt to implement Fabian tactics designed to slow down, delay and bleed the invaders.
There are at least 50,000 Iraqi regulars and many thousand irregulars clustered in towns bypassed by the US rush to Baghdad: Najaf, Nasiriyah, Hillah, Kut, Hindyah and Falluja. Repeated attempts by US forces to storm these towns have been repulsed with loss. Iraqi mechanized units in Divania actually counter-attacked US units and pushed them back last week. Basra appears to have fallen to the British.
Large numbers of combat worthy Iraqi regulars and irregulars are still fighting British invaders around Basra, even launching counter-attacks towards Faw and Umm-Qasr. British troops have penetrated no more than 1.5 kms into Basra City.
There remains a risk the garrisons of these besieged or bypassed strongholds could sally and assault US supply lines and follow-on forces in the rear, though Iraqi command is believed unable to mount a coordinated offensive given its total lack of air cover and badly degraded communications. Iraq has not yet fired most off its tactical ballistic missiles, including over 100 al-Samouds. Its 100-plane air force has simply vanished, and its once vaunted artillery arm has performed poorly.
Nevertheless, growing US forces will soon crush such scattered resistance and occupy Baghdad, though there will remain the risk of a long, low to medium intensity guerrilla war against the US-British colonization and exploitation of Iraq.
Given the fierce resistance mounted by Iraqi soldiers and civilians to the Anglo-Saxon invasion, chances are a guerrilla war will flare up once the conventional war ends. Up in the north, the problem of Kurdistan remains unresolved. The two main Kurdish groups want at least de facto independence from any new regime in Baghdad, just as in Afghanistan's northern Panjshiris, Uzbeks and Tajiks simply ignore the decrees of the US-installed `mayor of Kabul,' Hamid Karzai.
Foreign Correspondent