United States and British commanders have changed their tactics on the ground in Iraq to tackle paramilitary militias across the south before the assault on Baghdad, senior military sources said this week.
The new approach raises the possibility that coalition troops will be dragged into street fighting in towns and cities across the south that they had hoped to avoid.
Coalition troops advancing north from the Kuwaiti border have encountered far larger than expected units of well-armed and highly motivated fighters. One senior British military source described the situation in the south as a ”predicament”. It will also mean the attack on Baghdad may be delayed by several days.
From the US perspective this will temporarily ease the pressure on US soldiers from the army’s 5th Corps and the US marines whose advance north towards the frontline at Kerbala has anyway been seriously delayed by heavy sandstorms.
Military planners originally intended to rush troops north towards Baghdad, skirting the main towns of southern Iraq on the way. They were expecting to find only regular armoured Iraqi forces as they pushed north.
Some of the regular troops are still fighting, but many have put down their weapons, removed their uniforms and gone home.
In their place there are now thousands of fighters from three groups: the Fedayeen, the secret security organisation, and the Ba’ath Party militia, which have been deployed across the south to hold up the invasion, according to British military officials.
Iraqi military commanders disagree, insisting that the resistance in the south is coming from regular units.
”We came here cognisant that we would have to do some of this stuff sooner or later but we were probably expecting more of an armoured fight,” the military source said.
”But the enemy knows our capabilities and the enemy has chosen not to offer us that, but to give us a different opportunity which we are capitalising on.”
US supply lines, which stretch at least 560km north from the Kuwaiti border towards Baghdad, are vulnerable to attack. US marines on Wednesday slowed their advance north from the town of Nassiriya and began to spread out into the surrounding area to attack paramilitary mortar positions.
”We’re going into a hunting mode right now,” said Lieutenant-Colonel BT McCoy, from the 3rd Battalion, 4th US Marines. ”We’re going to start hunting down instead of letting them take the cheap shots.”
Pentagon officials said they were surprised by the capabilities of the Fedayeen forces. Soldiers from the US 7th Cavalry Regiment came up against the militia on Wednesday in fierce gunfights outside the town of Najaf, 160km south of the capital.
Before the ground invasion last week military officials forecast that President Saddam Hussein would withdraw his most elite fighters back to mount a defence in depth of Baghdad.
Although there are several divisions of well-equipped Republican Guard troops protecting the capital, the regime has also sent down to the south its paramilitaries who have put up a strong fight in the port town of Umm Qasr, the strategic port city of Basra and the town of Nassiriya further north.
British and US troops were now ”arranging ourselves ideally” to deal with the new threat, the British officer said. He described the change in tactics as a ”bit of adjustment”.
British forces around the city of Basra have shifted their approach from surrounding and containing the city to sending in small raiding parties to target paramilitaries and important leadership compounds. At least 1000 Fedayeen fighters are said to have taken up positions inside Basra.
Soldiers on the frontline have said Iraqi paramilitary fighters are operating in civilian clothes and frequently force civilians to walk ahead of them as they advance. In some cases the paramilitaries have pretended to surrender and then attacked US forces, army officials said.
”They put the E into evil in a massive way and we have got to bear that in mind,” the source said. ”They are pretty tenacious because they have got no alternatives.”
In a media-conscious attempt to undermine the importance of these forces, military officials at US Central Command in Qatar on Wednesday stopped using the word ”Fedayeen”, which means ”sacrifice” in Arabic, and instead began talking only of ”irregulars”.
The Fedayeen force is about 60000-strong and is thought to be commanded by Saddam’s youngest son.
US commanders insisted in public this week that there was no change to the overall battleplan.
”We have some pockets of resistance that require our attention but that doesn’t change the ultimate outcome,” Brigadier-General Vince Brooks told reporters. — Â