In the Second World War, the Germans gave a word to the kind of hopeless military dilemma that Saddam Hussein now faces. They called it a kessel — a cauldron. Sealed in by encircling US troops, the Iraqi leader is bottled up inside his capital city. If he is still alive, it is going to be his fate to stew in Baghdad, it seems.
Certainly, the remnants of Saddam’s regime, if not yet defeated, have been shrunk to a modest, albeit still dangerous, enclave. The question is: how come? How have allied forces managed to lay siege to the Iraqi capital so quickly?
A week ago reports spoke of British and American troops being bogged down by sandstorms and fierce Iraqi guerrilla resistance. Today their tanks are encircling the heart of Baghdad with all routes in and out of the city — including the symbolic road to Tikrit, Saddam’s home city — having been sealed by US Special Forces.
This dramatic reversal in the fortunes of the coalition has been achieved by a pincer of US army forces from the South-West and US Marine forces from the South-East. At the same time, Saddam’s seat of power has been battered by waves of strikes by American B-52 bombers that have lit the sky with huge flashes while American artillery has pounded the outskirts of the city.
There has been no more powerful a symbol of the dramatic shrinking of the Iraqi leader’s horizons than the fall of the airport named after him. For despite fierce firefights and scattered sharp pockets of resistance, Saddam International Airport near the capital is no longer. Yesterday US forces announced it had been given a neutral new appellation: Baghdad International Airport.
‘We control the airport. It’s a big area with a lot of buildings that need to be cleared, but it’s ours,’ Colonel John Peabody, commander of the Engineer Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division said yesterday. And with it the US forces control the fate of Baghdad itself, able to fly in fresh supplies and men at will.
The ultimate aim of the exercise was both strategic and psychological, as Major-General Victor Renuart made clear at a new conference at the allies’ war headquarters across the border in Qatar yesterday. ‘The message… really is to in a way put a bit of an exclamation point on the fact that coalition troops are in the vicinity of Baghdad… and demonstrate to the Iraqi leadership that they do not have control in the way they continue to say on their television service. I think that on the battlefield messages are critical to your strategy.’
The message was hammered home again yesterday. Just after 6am, local time, conventional American forces entered Baghdad for the first time. Some 26 Abrams tanks and 10 Bradley fighting vehicles had rumbled up a southern highway through the Baghdad suburb of Dawra, before swinging west and linking up with troops at the airport southwest of the city centre.
The American foray into Baghdad met resistance described by one representative as sporadic. ‘There were firefights but if you’re one of those folks who were involved in that firefight on the ground, it was pretty intense,’ Captain Frank Thorp said.
Four American soldiers were wounded, one of them shot in the head, and an Iraqi general was captured. Rocket-propelled grenades damaged one US tank. A second had to be abandoned in Baghdad because of mechanical failure. A number of small pick-up trucks drove straight towards the American convoy, ignoring warning shots. American soldiers turned machine gun fire on the cars, killing the occupants.
Renuart said the incursion had been a ‘clear statement of the ability of the coalition forces to move into Baghdad at times and places of their choosing’, though he stressed that the war was ‘far from over’.
The Americans said they won control of the airport, 20 kilometres from the city centre, on Friday. They say they hold the runway, but not all the outlying areas.
It has been, in short, a dramatic transformation in the fate of the allies, though experts remain divided as to its precise causes. For a start, it seems Saddam’s orders emphasised that Iraqi resistance should lie not in rings around the city, as many believed, but to the South where the Americans last week encountered the toughest fighting of the war so far. According to this interpretation, the might of the Republican Guard has already been encountered and broken by American troops.
Certainly, US formations fought with heavy concentrations of Republican Guards over the past few days and, say American representatives, took more than 2 500 prisoners from a single division.
Nevertheless, military planners are still worried that the mathematics of the Iraq conflict still do not add up. The units that they encountered are not what they expected, and the troops they have fought with have been easily brushed aside. They have, by and large, met only chaos and abandoned equipment.
As a result, other military experts put forward an alternative interpretation for last week’s rapid advances. It may be that Iraq’s toughest units, like the elite Special Republican Guard, have been ordered to avoid full-scale engagements and preserve themselves for fighting inside Baghdad, where reporters indicated last night that preparations were under way for a final, desperate battle. Troops could be seen moving around inside the city, setting up artillery pieces and ordering snipers on to roofs.
‘I believe those still loyal to the regime may well retreat into the city in some kind of last-ditch stand,’ British army representative Group Captain Al Lockwood said yesterday.
American Brigadier-General Vincent Brooks, a representative for the Central Command, was also unconvinced that his troops have had their long-anticipated showdown with Saddam’s finest soldiers. ‘A lot of us would like to know the answer to that,’ Brooks told the Washington Post. ‘We do not want to be overconfident. There will still, we believe, be fighting ahead. We should be sober about our approach.’
Nevertheless, there is no hiding the generally high morale and confidence of coalition troops who, despite talk last week of over-extended supply lines, have shown no signs of faltering in their rapid onslaught on Baghdad. Indeed, there was only one thing that the sand — begrimed men of the 3rd Infantry Division craved from journalists visiting their front lines outside Baghdad yesterday: cigarettes.
After a sleepless day and night that had seen American forces push up from Kerbala to Baghdad, the 3rd Infantry swung east late last week, parallel to the capital, and south to meet up with US Marines fighting around the city of Kut. Other units fanned out to the West as the troops moved in two vast arms to encircle Baghdad.
The desert landscape that the 3rd Infantry first saw on crossing from Kuwait has therefore been transformed in two brief weeks. Now on the very edges of Iraq’s capital, they find themselves travelling by palm-lined roads, fields and irrigation ditches, a measure of the speed of their invasion.
Even as the Americans began to surround their capital city, however, the Iraqis tried to extract one last desperate propaganda point. As US forces sped towards the now deserted Saddam International Airport, Iraqi officials made their own dash, taking Baghdad-based journalists by bus to the site to show that it was still in Saddam’s hands.
Yet this exercise was belied by events on the airfield’s southern perimeter. On a four-lane motorway, signposted ‘Baghdad Airport’ in Arabic and English, thousands of military vehicles of the 3rd Infantry Division were already moving towards the capital itself. The few Iraqi armoured columns which chose to do battle, or to try to hold their ground, were engaged by American F-16 fighter jets and the infantry’s tank fire.
According to one report, the result was carnage: hundreds of burning vehicles, both civilian and military, were scattered along the road from the Euphrates to Baghdad, along with hundreds of dead Iraqis, most in uniform, laying next to the vehicles. This, it seems, is all that is left of the Medina division of the Iraqi Republican Guard. In the brutal soldier-speak, this had become ‘combat ineffective’.
The utter destruction wreaked by the allies raises another key question. Given what has been inflicted on his troops and armour, why has Saddam not, as was widely predicted, used chemical and biological weapons to halt the US advance? Many military and intelligence officials had confidently predicted this would be the precise scenario in which he might deploy his arms of last resort.
True, chemical weapons suits have been found, and some suspicious materials, but as yet there has been no credible evidence that the Iraqi forces have even deployed chemical weapons on the battlefield. All that has been promised by the Iraqi leader is an increase in suicide attacks which have so far claimed the lives of seven soldiers.
‘Tonight we will do something unconventional, not by the military,’ Saddam’s Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf said on Friday. ‘We will do something which I believe is very beautiful… commando and martyrdom operations in a very new, creative way.’
Yesterday it was reported that a suicide bomber had attacked American soldiers at the airport, but there was no immediate word on any casualties. All of which leaves the biggest problem confronting the US military planners until last: having encircled Baghdad, what do you do with a city of five million people? The scale of the problem was underlined on Friday by the usually hawkish American Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who said that although Saddam and his entourage were doomed, his forces could survive if they changed sides at the last minute.
If they did capitulate, their surrender would certainly save America from a potential mess. So do the men of the 3rd Infantry Division and the US Marines blast their way through a Baghdad that it is now theirs to take, confounding the much-vaunted ‘humanitarian ideals’ of George Bush and Tony Blair?
If they wait, as the British forces have done outside Basra — and UK officers have been called in by US military planners — then they may have trouble.The Basra stalemate and humanitarian concerns for the city’s residents are already close to becoming an international scandal.
So which will be the fate of Baghdad: death by attrition or all-out attack? It is a question that may well determine the future success of the allies’ subsequent occupation and administration of Iraq.
Leaving Baghdad’s civilians inside a city with no electricity and rapidly diminishing supplies of fresh water and food threatens many of them with a lingering death. The Red Cross said yesterday that several hundred wounded Iraqis have already been admitted to hospitals since the American troops reached the city. ‘The situation is getting increasingly difficult,’ said representative Florian Westphal.
Yet a bitter, brutal onslaught on the capital city will trigger even more misery and fill the world’s TV screens with scenes of dead women and mutilated children – inflaming more local opposition and provoking further suicide attacks.
It is this latter scenario that the US military machine is now contemplating. ‘We’re not going to tiptoe into the city, it will be a forceful knock-out punch every time we go in,’ said US Marine Captain Matt Watt, commander of Lima Company, a unit of mechanised infantry trained in urban warfare.
‘We’ll make sure there’s no capability for the enemy to resist us, we’ll go in shooting up every time,’ he told Reuters. ‘And if we are to take the enemy out, it may unfortunately be at the cost of a lot of civilian lives, unintentionally. If we start taking a lot of fire, we will simply level the building area, destroying it with indirect fire and air and tanks. Then we’ll go in with ground forces. That’s when you get civilians who choose not to leave, and they’re going to die in the process.’
It is a chilling prospect, principally for the Iraqis, but also for the soldiers storming their capital. ‘Marines are trained in the urban fight but despite better training, you’re still going to take a lot of casualties. There’s just no way round it, it’s an extremely difficult fight in the urban area,’ Watt said.
The fight for Baghdad is unlikely, of course, to end up like the battle of Stalingrad, which ultimately claimed a million lives. Nevertheless, the very nature of the conflict that lies ahead looks uncomfortable and unforgiving.
The suffering of the people of Iraq, bottled up inside the cauldron that is their country’s capital city, is certainly not going to be over soon. – Guardian Unlimited Â