Despite Call to Battle, City Looks Little Prepared
With Invaders on Outskirts, Mood Is Calm
By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, April 3, 2003; Page A01
BAGHDAD -- With U.S. forces 30 miles from the outskirts of Baghdad -- once the destination of invading armies of Arabs, Mongols, Ottoman Turks and the British -- the ancient capital hardly projects the air of a fortress.
The four- and six-lane highways that radiate to the south and west are more burdened with pickups carrying onions and garlic than transports ferrying troops to the front. A scattering of checkpoints, pillboxes and sandbags mark the city's entrances -- a barren landscape interspersed with factories and groves of date palms and apricots. The sentries go largely unnoticed by children playing soccer in dirt fields and women in black chadors selling tomatoes and eggplant on straw mats along the street.
On the strategic road from Karbala, a concrete arch bears the inscription, "Baghdad welcomes you."
But with the swagger of confidence or delusion, the government of President Saddam Hussein has publicly relished the coming battle for Baghdad. Officials boast that the country's most vaunted units are primed to repel an assault for which they have planned for years.
In public statements, officials have predicted prolonged battles on the city's outskirts, where troops have deployed under the canopies of palm trees in farms watered by the Tigris River. As those forces fall back, the government has said it will revert to tactics employed with some success in southern cities -- bands of loyal militiamen holed up in poor, crowded neighborhoods harrying U.S. forces as they rumble down Baghdad's wide-open highways.
The strategy suggests that U.S. forces may enter Baghdad, and even claim victory in the heart of the city, long before resistance ends.
"There's nothing that prevents the enemy from doing anything in Baghdad, so be it," the defense minister, Sultan Hashem Ahmad, said last week of airstrikes that have struck the city night and day. "But the enemy must come inside Baghdad and that will be its grave."
Added Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz: "Stay in Baghdad and watch what will happen."
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