Senior American and British military commanders were last night accepting the unwelcome reality that the strategy of a quick war leading to an early collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime has failed.
As the US nearly doubled the strength of its force by flying in a further 120 000 troops — not expected to be deployed in Iraq until the end of April — and subjecting Baghdad to the heaviest bombing for several days, British commanders admitted that their troops were nowhere near to control ling Basra, the second largest city.
Basra was ”clearly nowhere near yet in our hands,” a British military representative, Colonel Chris Vernon, said. He admitted that the resolve and number of irregular Iraqi forces in the city were greater than anticipated.
General William Wallace, the US army’s senior commander in Iraq, said that the unexpected tactics of Iraqi fighters, and the US army’s stretched supply lines, were slowing down the campaign.
”The enemy we’re fighting is different from the one we’d war-gamed against,” he told the Washington Post and New York Times.
General Sir Mike Jackson, head of Britain’s army, declined to predict how long the war would last. He said that media references to coalition troops being ”bogged down” were ”tendentious”. Iraqi forces in southern Iraq were ”pinned down”, he insisted.
But he too acknowledged that the invading troops had not seen ”displays of a welcoming population”. By his side at a Ministry of Defence press conference in London, Adam Ingram, the armed forces minister, said coalition troops ”must convince Iraqis of their good intentions”.
In one of the areas where resistance has been unexpectedly tough, US marines and Iraqi forces exchanged tank and artillery fire in the southern city of Nassiriya. Several buildings, including the power plant, were ablaze.
In Baghdad, the biggest bombs so far were dropped. Two 4 500lb ”bunker busters” bombs struck a communications tower in the Iraqi capital.
In the south of the country, British military officials said that Iraqi forces were shooting at around 2 000 civilians trying to flee the fighting and a humanitarian crisis in the besieged city of Basra.
The major objective in the north was to seize the valuable oilfields near the city of Kirkuk, about 80 miles from a drop by American paratroopers on Thursday. ”Kirkuk is key,” said Major Mike Hastings of the US army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade. ”The Iraqis want it, the Kurds want it, the Turks want it.”
At the US central command in Qatar, Brigadier-General Vince Brooks said Iraqi prisoners had told US forces that chemical weapons had been sent to the Republican Guards’ Medina division, entrenched south of Baghdad. The PoWs had reported deployments of shells containing mustard gas, sarin, and nerve agents, he said. Intelligence sources played down the significance of the appearance in a film of an Iraqi cabinet meeting of a woman believed to be Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, one of Iraq’s senior biological weapons experts. – Guardian Unlimited Â