The cruise missiles fired in early hours of this morning were intended as a surgical strike at the Iraqi leadership. It was aimed at ”decapitating” the Iraqi leadership even before the tanks mustered on Iraqi border had been ordered to advance.
The real attack on Baghdad however has yet to begin.
Military planners hope the ”shock and awe” tactics the Pentagon has promised will convince most Iraqi soldiers to surrender immediately and even turn on their own commanding officers.
Priority targets for pilots will be Iraqi military command and control centres and the communication hubs Saddam Hussein relies on to keep his firm grip on power.
The bombing campaign will pave the way for the entry of US and British airborne troops, infantry and armoured divisions from Kuwait into southern Iraq. During the last Gulf war the air campaign lasted 39 days. This time it may be just a matter of hours before the troops invade.
Military targets in the south have been identified from satellite and spy plane photos and will be relatively straightforward to select. But the key to the bombing campaign lies in Baghdad, from where Saddam Hussein controls his forces.
Among the most important targets around Baghdad will be garrisons of the Republican Guard, the 70 000-strong force which is deployed on the three main roads leading into the capital. Inside the city they must hit the more elite Special Republican Guard, a smaller commando force of around 26 000 men loyal to President Saddam. They are the only troops in the capital and it is their task is to defend the city for as long as possible.
In Baghdad the first strategic target will be President Saddam’s palaces. Of the five in the city the most important is the Radwaniyah Palace, a compound built on nine square miles near the airport and surrounded by tall concrete walls.
A vast, domed palace in the compound is President Saddam’s main residence and office. There is also a prison, a large residential compound for the Special Republican Guards and a transport centre on the site, ostensibly for storing President Saddam’s cars, but which US officials believe may also house mobile biological weapons laboratories.
Guards stand by an anti-aircraft gun at the main gate and several tanks and more anti-aircraft guns line the wall of the compound. US and British generals will already have detailed maps and coordinates of the palace and its grounds, provided in part by detailed visits made by UN inspectors and from Iraqi maps retrieved during the Gulf war.
President Saddam has an even larger palace in Tikrit, a drab, industrial town where he was born, 100 miles north of Baghdad. There are 90 separate buildings in this sprawling site which straddles the Tigris river. Some suggest President Saddam himself may flee the capital and seek sanctuary in the town, which carries huge symbolic significance for the Iraqi regime: Tikrit was also the birthplace of Saladin, the great Muslim warrior who defeated the Crusaders.
Iraqi forces positioned on the northern border with the Kurdish-controlled region were seen pulling back in the build-up to the invasion to mount a solid defence of Tikrit. In October last year, the Guardian saw vast military bases already in place in the sprawling desert outside the town. There were camouflaged mobile rocket launchers, tanks, large field artillery and mobile communications centres.
There are dozens of other targets in the capital for the US and British military planners to choose from. The headquarters of the infamous Mukhabarat intelligence service may also be hit along with the ministry of defence and the Baath party headquarters, which was heavily bombed in the first Gulf war and has since been rebuilt.
The troops will also want to search and destroy the Abu Ghuraib palace site, which is a suspected biological weapons manufacturing facility and also home to one of Iraq’s most infamous detention and torture centres. Radio and television communication towers may be brought down to cut off the flow of the regime’s propaganda.
For 12 years since the Gulf war, the military has been poring over maps of Iraq and intelligence reports in preparation for a possible war. An inventory has been drawn up of every major building in the country and hundreds of military installations and vehicles have been scheduled for destruction: army barracks, tanks and armoured vehicles, jets, missile launch sites, potential chemical and biological weapons sites and air defence systems.
There is no shortage of targets but the goal will be to hit as many as possible at the same time in a devastating show of force. The Pentagon calls it ”simultaneity” and says it should break the will of the Iraqi regime and convince them of the inevitability of defeat.
Baghdad is divided in two parts by the Tigris whose grey waters run through the centre of the city. The several bridges across the river make tempting targets, but destroying them is likely to trigger a wave of international criticism.
Civilian infrastructure like water treatment and sanitation plants and the al-Dorah oil refinery, which was half-destroyed when it was struck by eight missiles on January 19, 1991 at the very start of the Gulf war, are likely to escape the bombing raids this time round. Maintaining the ”moral high ground,” senior British officers have acknowledged, will be fundamental to winning the war and securing the peace.
The goals will also be to ensure that no chemical or biological weapons are launched, that no missiles are fired off at Israel and to prevent President Saddam setting fire to his own oil fields . – Guardian Unlimited Â