re: Iraqi marshes/floods. "Desert War" not so dry:
Flooding Could Be An Iraqi Weapon
Miami Herald February 16, 2003
Lt. Matthew K. Massey, a U.S. Marine Corps combat engineer, says he almost laughs when he hears
talk about a "desert war" with Iraq. "Maybe it will be more like a water war," he said.
Massey knows that American ground troops attacking Baghdad from Kuwait will have to cross the
mighty Euphrates and Tigris rivers, the muddy Mesopotamia region between them plus a vast
latticework of irrigation canals and farm paddies that Iraqi troops can flood at will.
President Saddam Hussein could also blow up three dams around Baghdad and send a wall of water
rushing down the southern approaches to his capital city, where he has entrenched elite troops
for a final stand.
"If he lets loose with those he can really slow us down and create some problems," said Lt. Cmdr.
Pat Garin, 39, of Albuquerque, N.M., executive officer of the Navy Seabees' 74th Mobile
Construction Battalion.
<SNIP>
`WAR OF THE PUMPS'
More recently, Iraq and Iran flooded and drained fields to their own advantage on the southern
front of their war in the 1980s, in what one Western diplomat at the time called "the War
of the Pumps."
At the start of the war in 1980, Iraq created Fish Lake, a shallow moat totaling 300 square
miles and designed to block an Iranian ground attack against the city of Basra, 28 miles north
of the border with Kuwait.
Iraqi troops retreating from a 1986 Iranian attack on the nearby Faw peninsula pumped water
into the area's grid of salt evaporation flats to slow the attackers, and the Iranians opened sluices
to drain them.
In recent years, Hussein has also drained the Hawize marshes that straddle the Iraq-Iran border
north of Basra, home to Shiite Muslims who have long fought against Iraq's predominantly Sunni
Muslim regime.
(MORE...):http://www.military.com/NewsContent?file=FL_flood_021703 |
