British Forces Confronted by Guerrilla Tactics
With Enemies in Civilian Clothes, Soldiers Recall Northern Ireland
By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
ALONG HIGHWAY 8, Iraq, March 24 -- As U.S. soldiers and Marines swiftly advance toward Baghdad, British forces left behind to man the checkpoints, control the roads and occupy the cities here in southern Iraq say the military campaign for them has taken on the feel of a Northern Ireland-style guerrilla war.
It is, they say, a war with no front lines, no heavy troop concentrations, no fixed positions -- and no safe areas.
From Safwan, just north of the Kuwaiti border, to the Persian Gulf port town of Umm Qasr, 15 miles to the southeast, to the highway leading north to Basra, Iraqi troops armed with rocket-propelled grenades have staged hit-and-run ambushes against British outposts and U.S. convoys passing through on the long trip north. They have laid land mines on roads, set booby traps and caused British units camped along the highways to constantly shift positions at night to evade attack.
Umm Qasr, a key Iraqi port that U.S. officials said they hoped to use for military or humanitarian supplies, was declared to be under U.S. and British control three days ago, but house-to-house battles still raged there today.
Meanwhile, an estimated 1,000 Iraqi troops armed with Soviet-era tanks and artillery have held out for four days in Basra, the regional capital of more than 1 million people. [On Tuesday morning, British military officials changed their strategy for resolving the Basra standoff, declaring that the city was a legitimate military target and that Iraqi troops would be expelled by force, correspondent Alan Sipress reported from U.S. Central Command headquarters in Doha, Qatar.]
In both places, Iraqi defenders have defied the U.S. claims of victory by interspersing themselves with civilians and putting up a determined resistance. Just as troubling, British soldiers say, is the danger of attack along the region's roads, sometimes from troops and sometimes from Iraqis in civilian clothes carrying AK-47 assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.
U.S. officials and analysts had predicted that the south's largely Shiite Muslim population would rise up against President Saddam Hussein's Baath Party government once the U.S.-led invasion began. The Shiites, a thin majority of Iraq's 23 million inhabitants, have long resented the fact that Sunnis, the country's other main Muslim strain, have long dominated Iraq's government and economy. The Shiites launched an uprising after the 1991 Persian Gulf War but were put down harshly by government security forces. A Shiite rebel group, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, has several thousand armed guerrillas based in Iran and, it claims, an underground ready to rebel against Hussein in southern Iraq.
But so far, no such popular insurrection has taken place. In addition, the civilian population in general has been reserved toward the U.S. and British forces, many of whom expected to be greeted as liberators. Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the head of the U.S. Central Command who is directing the war, said in a news conference at command headquarters in Doha, Qatar, that the reason for their restraint is simple: "It's fear," he declared. "Fear. The practice of this regime over a long time."
Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain said in London another reason is the failure of U.S. forces to assist the Shiite rebellion in 1991. "They cannot be sure in their own minds yet that we mean what we say," Blair said. "In their own minds, they have to be very circumspect until they're sure the regime's gone."
Whatever the reason, British troops in the dry, sandy expanses here and in the humid port installations of Umm Qasr have gone on permanent alert, trying to avoid causing civilian casualties while also trying to avoid getting killed themselves.
"The buzzword here is 'asymmetrical battle,' " said Capt. Jim Bowen, stationed along Highway 8 with a British signal corps. "What you're seeing here is an asymmetrical battle. Instead of going in like last time with a clenched fist, we're kind of poking.
"Unfortunately, we've got many years of experience in Belfast," he added. "This has taken on more of a counterinsurgency feel, with vehicle checkpoints."
Another British fusilier, stationed on the road to Basra stopping Iraqi civilian vehicles wanting to enter the besieged city, had a similar comment: "This is more like Northern Ireland," he said.
British officers said they had to briefly close the border with Kuwait last night and early this morning because of fears of ambushes on U.S. convoys driving through Safwan, which was captured on the first day of the ground offensive. With most of the U.S. Marines and Army 3rd Infantry Division soldiers who rolled across the border Thursday now far up the road toward Baghdad, some of them 200 miles or more, they have created for themselves a potentially vulnerable supply line from northern Kuwait.
Journalists traveling independently of U.S. forces gathered today at a British communications post on Highway 8 looking for a safe place to set up camp and spend the night. They were informed that there were no such "safe areas," even as Franks was telling reporters "there are a great many areas under coalition control" in southern Iraq. Most of the journalists left for Kuwait because they could not find any areas under such control.
In the opening days of the campaign, British military police set up a small position at an intersection on the outskirts of Safwan, where journalists had also camped. That position was abruptly abandoned late Sunday, for fear of an impending attack. By this morning, Iraqis from the town had swarmed over the site, picking over whatever the soldiers and journalists left behind in their hurried exit.
British troops at another checkpoint on Highway 8 went into their highest security mode late Sunday with word of a possible ambush, taking up defensive positions around vehicles and ordering a blackout and complete silence.
U.S. officials said today that resistance in Umm Qasr has been broken and the town is under British control. But reporters taking the road toward Umm Qasr this morning encountered large groups of armed Iraqis in civilian clothes walking down the highway and mulling on the road, brandishing automatic weapons.
Farther north, the Basra siege continued for the fourth day, with British troops exchanging artillery fire with Iraqi defenders massed inside. But British forces were hampered by the Iraqi tactic of moving into civilian areas, preventing artillery or air attacks because of concern over civilian casualties.
[By Tuesday morning, continued resistence by Iraqi forces inside the city forced the British battle plan to evolve. "We are now considering Basra as military objective because of the humanitarian situation there, and we need to go in as soon as possible and relieve that," said British Flight Lt. Peter Darling, a spokesman for British forces at Central Command headquarters.
["We're very aware of our humanitarian considerations," he said. "We're not here to cause mayhem and move on," Darling said.
[He said British forces would target military and political sites in the city, not civilian ones. A battle for Basra, he said, is "not something we'd wish on any army."]
One effect of the standoff in Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, is the inability to use its international airport to bring in badly need humanitarian aid for Iraqis in the south. Similarly, Umm Qasr would be an important maritime entry point for supplies.
"We need water, we need electricity, we need food," said Hussein Jabar, 20, a local farmer who described how his family has to buy water from a tanker truck at 350 Iraqi dinars per liter and store it in barrels. He said electricity to the area has been cut since Wednesday.
Asked about his view of the war so far, he said, "It's the same like '91. It's similar, but it's faster and bigger." And of the continued Iraqi resistance, he said, "I didn't think the Iraqis would hide their soldiers in among the farmers."
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