Resistance Raises Fears for the Endgame
Rapid campaign hit by unexpectedly fierce battles
by Julian Borger in Washington and Richard Norton-Taylor
Published on Monday, March 24, 2003 by the Guardian/UK
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.
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
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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