The United States military has begun fresh ”offensive operations” in Baghdad in an attempt to take on Iraq’s growing guerrilla movement.
Evidence on the ground suggests the attacks are as much a message of superior firepower as about apprehending resistance fighters.
”What you are seeing from the coalition forces are offensive operations that are intended to go out and find the terrorists in their lairs,” said Lieutenant Colonel George Krivo, a US military spokesperson.
Codenamed ”Iron Hammer”, the sweep began on Wednesday night when an AC-130 Spectre gunship, equipped with heavy and light-calibre cannon delivering devastating firepower, shot up an empty textile warehouse in south Baghdad apparently used as a resistance gathering point.
On Thursday night, tanks and another AC-130 fired at a base once used by Saddam Hussein’s eldest son, Qusay, as well as Special Security and Special Republican Guard forces.
The assault, together with similar operations elsewhere in Baghdad, amounted to one of the heaviest nights of explosions since the war.
Iraqis living near the base in Farat, west Baghdad, said that it had been heavily bombed during the war, but even on Friday looters were still stripping iron wires from inside the concrete walls.
Thursday night’s attack damaged a roof and adjoining walls but left the complex of buildings standing.
Residents on Friday admitted that three days earlier, rocket-propelled grenades had been fired from the site at a US base.
But the residents appeared confused by the message the new tactic was delivering. They said American soldiers had knocked on their doors early on Thursday evening to warn them an attack was coming.
”The Americans told us to take care of the children and to stop them running outside in the streets.
”They told us they wanted to flatten those buildings. I don’t know why they did it,” said Ashraf Ahmed (19).
Several Iraqi guards from the Facility Protection Service, helping to guard the nearby US base, questioned the attack’s effectiveness.
”I don’t see how this is going to work. People who really want to attack the Americans are not going to stop because a building has been destroyed,” said one who declined to give his name.
”The bombing just made people afraid and it didn’t achieve much. They want to make people afraid, both the resistance and civilians, and to show they are here and they are strong. It felt like the first day of the war again.”
Mortars had fired back at the Americans’ hilltop position during the operation, he added.
Krivo defended the use of heavy weaponry.
”It is not unusual for coalition commanders on the ground to call for overwhelming firepower,” he said.
The AC-130, a version of the Hercules transport plane, was first used in Vietnam to lay down a carpet of fire. Upgraded and fitted with more weaponry and electronics, it was deployed in Grenada, Panama, Somalia and more recently against the Taliban in Afghanistan. It has a side-firing 105mm howitzer, 40mm cannon, and a 25mm Gatling gun firing 1 800 rounds a minute.
Krivo said there had been a ”migration of tactics” whereby resistance fighters were relying more and more on mortars and rockets to hit at US bases and convoys, and the US was in part trying to hit ”terrorist mortar teams”.
In the past fortnight several mortar rounds and rockets have have landed inside Baghdad’s ”green zone” protecting the US military and civilian headquarters. One attack this week destroyed several parked cars, although no one was injured.
US military officials admitted that their missions would no doubt provoke an increase in attacks on US forces.
”It is not surprising that we are seeing a reaction from the enemy as we go out and attack them,” Krivo said.
Near Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, a US Apache helicopter on Thursday night killed seven Iraqis who the military said were preparing to fire rockets at a US base. A store of 600 missiles and rockets was found.
Carlos Raleiras, a reporter for the Portuguese radio station TSF, was kidnapped in south Iraq on Friday after a convoy of three cars driving from Kuwait to Basra was shot at. Maria Joao Ruela, of the Portuguese TV network SIC, was wounded in the leg. — Guardian Unlimited Â