6
History repeats itself, though no two historians agree quite how. Those who reported the First Gulf War of 1990–91 had an almost eerie impression of events replicating themselves between Iraq and its enemies twelve years later but, once the campaign began to unfold, it was the differences rather than the similarities which commanded attention and demanded explanation. In February 1991 a very large and high-quality Western army confronted an equally large but low-quality Iraqi army and, following six weeks of intense aerial attack, destroyed its military capability in four days of fighting. In March 2003 a much smaller but even higher quality Western army confronted an Iraqi army degraded and ennervated by its earlier defeat and by twelve years of isolation from its foreign sources of supply and, during three weeks of high-speed advance over long distances, brought about not merely its disintegration but its apparent evaporation from the field of battle. By the beginning of April the evidence of defeat strewed the Iraqi landscape, discarded small arms, shot-riddled military vehicles, burnt-out tanks and the pathetic, ragged bodies of Iraqi dead; yet not only had Saddam’s army disappeared from view. The signs lacked that it had ever been there. There were no columns of surrendering prisoners, no senior officers offering their capitulation. The war was over but where was the defeated enemy? For all the millions of rounds of ammunition expended, for all the thousands of tons of high explosive delivered to targets, it was as if the Iraqi army had not existed in the first place. American and British soldiers could testify to the undoubted experience of combat, often at high intensity; but when the shooting stopped, their enemies had vanished.
Yet the Iraqi army had undoubtedly existed before the shooting began. Coalition intelligence had a clear picture of its order of battle and had drawn up detailed situation maps of its deployment on the ground. The Iraqi forces consisted of three elements. Militarily the most significant was the Republican Guard, founded by President Arif in the early 1960s as his régime’s praetorian guard to protect it against coups and officered and to a considerable extent recruited from Arif’s al-Jumaila tribe, who live in the al-Ramadi region on the Euphrates west of Baghdad. Originally only of brigade size, though with an integral tank regiment, it was progressively expanded under Arif’s successors. Saddam raised it to a strength of six divisions, recruited and officered from men identified for their loyalty to himself personally and to the Ba’ath party. At the outbreak of war in 1991 it consisted of the Adnan Mechanized Division, the Baghdad Infantry Division, the Abed Infantry Division, the Medina Armoured Division, the Nebuchadnezzar Infantry Division and the Hammurabi Mechanized Division. Saddam also raised a Special Republican Guard of three brigades as an inner security force, commanded by his son Qusay, but it was not organized for combat. The Republican Guard retained its strength of 60,000 men in 2003, though its equipment, like that of all formations in Iraq, was badly serviced and short of spare parts. The Adnan, Baghdad and Abed divisions were stationed north of Baghdad, the Nebuchadnezzar and Hammurabi to the south and the Medina on the outskirts of the capital.
The so-called regular army had greatly shrunk in size since 1991. Then its paper strength was over forty divisions. By 2003, because of the losses suffered in the First Gulf War, of desertions and of inefficiencies of administration, the number of divisions totalled only seventeen: six infantry and two mechanized divisions in the north, one armoured and two infantry divisions in the centre, deployed on the border with Iran, and in the south two armoured, one mechanized and three infantry divisions. All were undermanned. Even the Iraqi government seems to have lacked a clear picture of the army’s strength: perhaps 200,000 at most or as few as 150,000. Its equipment stocks had also fallen disastrously low. In 1991 it had over 5,000 tanks, but in 2003 it had only 2,000; nearly 7,000 armed personnel carriers in 1991, in 2003 less than 2,000; self-propelled artillery equipment 500 in 1991, 150 in 2003; towed guns 3,000 in 1991, under 2,000 in 2003. Most of the Iraqi equipment, moreover, largely Soviet but some French in origin, was old, even antiquated; its T-55 tanks were a fifty-year-old model, worse than obsolete, actually death traps if pitted against modern Western tanks. Everything – tanks, personnel carriers, artillery pieces – lacked spare parts and was badly serviced. The same was true of the anti-aircraft equipment; before 1990 Iraq had operated an extensive, integrated air-defence system, with many radars linked by fibre-optic connections to control centres. In the interwar period, 1991–2003, when America, Britain and their allies enforced the ‘no-fly’ zones over northern and southern Iraq, much of this equipment was destroyed by radar-seeking missiles, the result of Saddam’s having ordered the allied aircraft to be attacked or targeted despite the inevitably harmful consequences. The only effective equipment in the Iraqi armoury were a few surface-to-air missiles, including some shoulder-fired systems – but these were useful only against helicopters and low-flying aircraft – and the South African-built 155mm G5 gun.
A third category of Iraqi armed force, beside the Republican Guard and the regular army – a misnomer, since the soldiers were conscripts, not long-service enlistees – were the irregulars, who were often to prove the most dedicated fighters. There were several varieties of irregular units. Loosely and collectively known as fedayeen (‘martyrs’), after the Islamic fighters who opposed the Soviet army in Afghanistan, they included members of the Popular Army founded by Saddam in the 1970s as a political counterweight to the army itself, Ba’ath party faithful and a considerable contingent of anti-Western fanatics from other Islamic countries, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Morocco and Pakistan foremost. Their number was hard to calculate. As the British complained at the beginning of their efforts to administer the mandate in 1921, the Iraqi countryside was awash with weapons; almost every Iraqi male possessed a rifle and was ready to use it, in tribal, inter-village, family or personal dispute. The situation was not different eighty years later.
Air power was the only element of Iraq’s defences with which the coalition did not have to reckon. In 1991 the Iraqi air force, equipped with several hundred Soviet and French aircraft, was still formidable, even if unequal to a full-scale confrontation. In the event it declined the challenge; after suffering heavy losses in the opening days of the campaign, it decamped en masse to Iran, where it was given refuge until the war was over. In 2003 only a remnant of Iraqi air strength survived. It made no effort to contest the issue once the invasion began and much of its surviving equipment was discovered hidden in a remote location as the coalition forces advanced.
The force that the coalition opposed the Iraqis, though wholly outweighing it in quality, was altogether smaller than that which had fought the First Gulf War. Then the alliance had deployed eight American divisions (seven army, two marine), a British armoured division, a French light armoured division, two Egyptian and one Syrian divisions and contingents of varying size from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and twelve other countries, totalling nearly 750,000 troops. They had been assembled through the relentless telephone diplomacy of President George H. W. Bush, who had also persuaded the coalition he created to add significant air and naval components to the troops General Schwarzkopf eventually commanded. President George W. Bush went to war with a considerably smaller deployment. The British, as before, sent a division and other naval, air and ground troops. Australia, which had sent a naval force to the 1991 war, again sent ships, together with aircraft and special forces. Otherwise the strength was exclusively American, the allies of 1991 having declined to lend support.
The American armed forces of the late twentieth century had emerged from a difficult past. Tiny before 1941, as befitted those of a country that eschewed involvement in world affairs, they had grown during the Second World War to become stronger at sea and in the air than any other and to include a large army of formidable fighting power. Sharply reduced in size during the peace that followed and in the belief that possession of nuclear weapons made larger conventional forces an expensive redundancy, they had been rapidly expanded to fight the Vietnam War of 1965–72. Its human costs and the political turmoil it engendered had cast the United States Army, in particular, into disarray. Belief in the value of the military vocation was compromised, morale and discipline were eroded. Much of civil society ceased to give support and the forces risked losing belief in themselves and their mission.
They were rescued by the emergence of a new generation of young officers who resolved to rebuild the military ethos from within. Gradually, under the patriotic Presidency of Ronald Reagan, the military regained its morale; President Reagan’s extravagant spending on defence trumped the Soviet Union’s ability to sustain the Cold War; new military doctrines and capabilities persuaded army, navy and air force that they had the capacity to meet any challenge the post-Cold War world would present. The test of their revived self-confidence came in 1991, when truly post-Vietnam forces took the field and achieved victory in a brilliant display of professional competence.
The expeditionary force of 2003 had put doubt behind it. Its officers and enlisted men, army, navy, air force, marines, knew that the Iraqis who opposed them did not match their quality, however measured. In terms of equipment, personnel, organization or military practice, they were better than any in the field and matched by only a tiny handful of close allies.
The force was commanded at the top by Central Command, created in the Reagan years to oversee operations beyond the continental United States and tri-service in composition. Interservice rivalry had bedevilled American military activity throughout the Cold War, and inter-service rivalry had been farther compounded by demarcation disputes between the regional commands of the single services. The Central Command system, designed to place unified tri-service forces in any chosen theatre of operations, working under a commander having authority over all assigned components, had first been tried in the Gulf in 1990–91. The system had proved itself, though with need for refinement. The First Gulf War commander, Norman Schwarzkopf, an army general, had exercised his authority directly and with little regard for personal sensitivities. General Tommy Franks, the Central Command commander in 2003, was to work in a different way. Because he was also responsible for the continuing operation in Afghanistan, he could not directly control the land battle but had to delegate authority to the Third Army commander, Lieutenant General David McKiernan. Franks, moreover, was a markedly different character from Schwarzkopf, less of a showman, less overbearing and more thoughtful. By origin an enlisted man, he had begun his career in the artillery but made his way upwards in the armoured cavalry, itself an interarms organization comprising artillery and infantry as well as armoured components. He thus understood several different military disciplines and had also acquired an openness to the armed forces of other countries that was to be of the greatest value in an operation in which he had to control British and Australian as well as American forces. Perhaps because he had not been through the rigid processing of West Point, he has an enquiring mind, an ability to think on his feet and a remarkable freedom from the doctrinaire approach so often characteristic of the products of Sparta-on-Hudson. He is an attractive character, with a touching gratitude for the opportunity his army has given him to rise from his origins as a ‘trailer park kid’ to the rank of four star general.
In the expeditionary force the chain of command led from General Franks via General McKiernan to two subordinate formations, V Corps, part of Third Army, and the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force. V Corps consisted of 3rd Infantry Division, parts of 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), a brigade of 82nd Airborne Division, to which was later added 173rd Airborne Brigade and parts of 4th Infantry Division. The 1st Marine Expeditionary Force was composed of 1st Marine Division, Task Force Tarawa, which was a reinforced marine brigade, and 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing.
An infantry division is an armoured division in all but name, fielding 270 Abrams tanks as well as self-propelled artillery, a large infantry component mounted in Bradley fighting vehicles and an integral unit of Apache helicopter gunships. It has the ability to form itself rapidly into battle groups – typically a Bradley battalion and a tank battalion – for tasks demanded by the changing tactical situation, and to subdivide its artillery to provide battle group support. Its helicopters are trained to operate on the ‘cab rank’ principle, answering calls to provide overhead support at short notice. The division could also call on air support from air force or navy squadrons, though those were not under command.
The Marine Expeditionary Force was organized differently, achieving a high degree of integration between its ground and air components. A marine air wing’s aircraft are flown by marine pilots; wing and division are permanently associated. Marine divisions have long histories; 1st Marine Division had fought in the First World War and taken part in most of the great island battles of the Pacific War of 1942–45, as had its sub-units, 1st Marines, 4th Marines, 5th Marines and 7th Marines. These Marine regiments, like old-style British infantry regiments, have several battalions, with long and distinguished histories. 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines, for example, had fought at Guadalcanal and Pelelieu, bitter struggles with the Japanese in which it had won cherished battle honours. 1st Marine Division’s infantry battalions were organized into three regimental combat teams, 1, 5 and 7 RCT, comprising 3rd/1st, 1st/4th and 2nd/23rd Marines, 1st, 2nd and 3rd/5th Marines and 1st and 3rd/7th Marines and 3rd/4th Marines. Each RCT also included a tank and a light armoured reconnaissance battalion and amphibious armour (Amtracs) from 2nd and 3rd Assault Amphibian Battalions. The divisional artillery was provided by three battalions of 11th Marines and combat engineers by 1st Marine Engineer Battalion.
It is the uniformly ‘Marine’ character of the three United States Marine Corps divisions that give them their formidable fighting power. Even in the highly cohesive modern US Army, slight fault lines exist between infantry, armour, artillery and helicopter units; they are recruited separately and trained separately, at camps owned by the branch to which they belong. Marines, by contrast, all join together and train together and are Marines before they are infantry, armour or artillery. The mythology of the Marines, expressed in the Marine Hymn and the motto, Semper Fidelis (Always Faithful), together with a litany of Corps slogans – including ‘A Marine Never Dies’ – has poetic truth. If a recruit chooses to think otherwise, he will be put straight by the long service NCO of the Corps, gunnery sergeants and sergeant-majors, who are tradition’s ultimate guardians. Marines are admired throughout the American armed forces and beyond, particularly by the British army and Royal Marines, who served with the USMC in Korea and the First Gulf War.
The 1st Marine Division and the 3rd Infantry Division provided General Franks with his main force for the drive on Baghdad. There were ancillary units. Some came from the 82nd Airborne Division and the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault). The two are sister formations. Raised during the Second World War as parachute divisions, with a complement of glider infantry, they had dropped on the night of 5–6 June 1944 on the western flank of the Normandy bridgehead to open the invasion of Europe. Subsequently their glider infantry battalions had been disbanded, gliders proving too vulnerable to ground fire, and the 101st had eventually given up parachuting to become entirely heliborne, with a heavy complement of gunships to cover infantry landing at the point of assault. For the Iraq War the 101st deployed as a nearly complete formation, the 82nd provided a brigade. Also deployed was the 173rd, a ‘separate’ parachute brigade which dropped into Kurdistan to provide conventional support to the peshmerga guerrillas.
The other large formation available to General Franks was the British 1st (UK) Armoured Division, a hastily assembled formation consisting of the 7th Armoured Brigade, which had fought in the First Gulf War, the 16th Air Assault Brigade, composed of parachute and helicopter units, and the 3rd Commando Brigade of Royal Marines. Because the Commandos are a light force, trained and equipped for intervention operations, General Franks attached to them the 1st Marine Expeditionary Unit, which fielded tanks and helicopter gunships.
The plan for Operation Iraqi Freedom began to be drawn up as early as 1995, when Saddam’s combination of deviousness and intransigence persuaded Washington that it might not be possible to avoid a military confrontation if his determination to develop and deploy weapons of mass destruction were to be quashed. The original problem was to choose a point of departure. Iraq is a difficult country to attack. Though it was, under Saddam, on bad terms with all its neighbours – Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Turkey and Kuwait – all might have reasons for wishing to deny Western governments basing or transit rights. Iran was still, under its ayatollah régime, implacably anti-Western. The monarchical government of Saudi Arabia, closely allied to a puritanical Islamic clerisy and in fear of provoking an anti-Western reaction in its population, was unlikely to offer the same operational facilities as it had done in 1990–91, when Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait had confronted it with the direct threat of Iraqi aggression. Syria, accused by the United States of sponsoring international terrorism, was too hostile to be drawn into an anti-Saddam coalition despite its troubled relations with Iraq. Jordan, though pro-Western, feared for its credentials as an Arab state if it co-operated too closely with a Western incursion into the Middle Eastern world though it would do so covertly. By a process of elimination, therefore, only three points of entry remained. One was Iraq’s own sea coast, a short, constricted and swampy stretch of shoreline at the head of the Gulf; a second was across the Iraqi–Turkish border; and third, the territory of Kuwait. Kuwait, the weakest of all Arab states, was the most likely provider of basing and transit facilities. Not only had it suffered invasion and occupation in 1991, its very right to exist as an independent sovereignty was denied by Saddam, as it had been by several of his predecessors.
It might nevertheless have been feared that Kuwait, for reasons of timorous self-protection, would shy from providing a Western coalition with a place d’armes. It was one thing to host a force that would achieve a victorious blitzkrieg, disposing of Saddam the aggressor forever; another thing altogether to provide military facilities for a crisis that might be settled by negotiation, leaving Saddam still in power, chastened but capable of taking his revenge at some later date when the West’s attention would perhaps be diverted by trouble in another region of the world altogether. It was greatly to Kuwait’s credit that it chose to align itself with the Western coalition from the start and to abide by its choice unflinchingly.
The enigma in the pre-war planning process was Turkey. Though the Turkish population is exclusively Muslim, the state is doctrinally secular and so anti-Islamic, a national ethos determined by the country’s founder, Kemal Ataturk, who had rejected Ottomanism, pan-Turanianism (a movement seeking to unify all Turkic-speaking peoples in and outside the boundaries of modern Turkey) and the Muslim Caliphate. Kemal chose what he identified as the path of nationalism: that his Turkey would impose separation of mosque and state and pursue the path of modernization, which to him meant Westernization. Kemalist Turkey was the only true success among the new states to emerge from the postwar settlement of 1918. It evolved swiftly into a stable polity, free of internal racial or religious conflicts, neutral between the great power blocs yet open to influence from the West and committed to economic development and the education of its people. Kemal entrusted the protection of this system and philosophy to the institution within which he had grown up and come to power, the Turkish army. The army was Kemalist through and through, suspicious of any form of political extremism, even more suspicious of Islamic influence in public life and ready, if it detected any destabilization of the Kemalist settlement, to seize power and restore the balance. The army has exercised political power several times in recent Turkish history but always, when it was satisfied that Kemalist normality had been re-established, has returned to barracks and resigned control to civilian politicians.
Even in secularist Turkey, however, the Islamic mood sweeping the Muslim world had had its effect. While the army and the official class remained faithful to the Kemalist legacy, a religious revival had been gaining ground in the provinces for twenty years. A mosque-building boom had raised new minarets in many towns and villages and Muslim dress, outlawed by Kemal, had re-appeared. In November 2002 an overtly Islamic party, led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had gained power at the general election. It had new priorities. For fifty years Turkish politics had been dominated by issues scarcely different from those engaging the political class throughout Europe or America: economic advancement, anti-Communism and, more recently, inter-state relationships within the context of continental co-operation. Turkey had early set its sights on securing admission to the European Union, in which it was supported by the United States, grateful as it was for Turkey’s loyal membership of NATO. Only the historic antipathy of Greece to normalizing relations with its former imperial master appeared to stand in the way and even the Greeks seemed persuadable. The election of Erdogan’s party imposed an abrupt change. While the Kemalists would never have done anything to damage relations with Washington, Erdogan was concerned, as an Islamicist, to show his readiness to oppose the United States in a matter involving another Muslim country.
Washington, anticipating difficulty, decided to resort to inducement. Its initial planning for the invasion of Iraq laid heavy emphasis on the need for Turkish co-operation, which it had fully enjoyed in 1990–91. It needed the use of Turkish airspace, which it had had during its operation of the northern ‘no-fly’ zone in the 1990s. It even more urgently needed transit rights through Turkish territory into northern Iraq, for the passage of a major military force able to engage Saddam’s army from a second direction. A division, the 4th Infantry, had been earmarked for the intervention and had been brought by sea from the continental United States to the eastern Mediterranean. Without the Erdogan government’s co-operation, however, it could neither be landed at a Turkish port nor staged southward through Turkish territory. The Erdogan government’s consent would, it was known, be difficult to secure. There was not only the question of its Islamic sympathies. There was also the issue of Turkish attitudes, quite separate from any religious ingredient, to Kurdish politics. The 4th Division’s deployment area would be within Iraqi Kurdistan. The Kurds, ethnically an Iranian people, Muslim but not Arab, were in the unfortunate position of having a strong sense of national identity but no national territory; their habitat straddled the borders of at least four countries, including Iran, Iraq and Turkey. Within Turkey they were categorized not as a separate minority but as ‘mountain Turks’ and the Ankara government was resolute in treating them, numerous as they were, as ethnic Turks. It feared all developments that would encourage Kurdish separatism, particularly any move to establish Iraqi Kurdistan as a political entity. An American military intervention in the region, which would inevitably entail American military co-operation with the Kurdish guerrilla forces fighting the Baghdad central government, threatened what Turkey most feared.
In the circumstances, it was understandable that the American government should be willing to pay for Ankara’s co-operation. So it showed itself to be; it offered $6 billion in aid as a recompense for the Turkish parliament’s agreement to allow the 4th Infantry Division and other American forces to enter Turkish territory. The inducement was not large enough; perhaps none could have been. The Islamic majority in the new Turkish parliament apparently placed religious affinity above historic political association. On 1 March 2003, the American proposal was rejected. Rather than appear anti-Islamic, the new Turkish parliamentarians were prepared to risk alienating the United States, the defence it had offered through NATO against Soviet Russia, Turkey’s oldest and most formidable enemy, and the support it provided for Turkey’s effort to enter the European Union.
Frantic diplomatic activity was to follow the rejection of 1 March; British as well as American diplomats attempted repeatedly to change the Turks’ minds; but without success. It became clear that if there was to be a northern front to the attack against Saddam it would have to be opened by other means. One was to encourage the peshmergas – divided into two main political groupings – to intensify their attacks; a second was to support them with special forces; a third was to bring more conventional intervention forces into the region – both the insertion of special forces and other troops would require the creation of an ‘air bridge’, a difficult logistic and delicate diplomatic task; a fourth was to use subversive means to persuade Saddam that the Turks would eventually fall in with the Americans after all.
The story of the creation of the peshmerga-cum-special forces-cum-intervention units front belongs later in the story. The subversive campaign was part of the preliminary planning. General Franks told me that, when it became clear that the Turkish parliamentary position could not be shifted, his headquarters turned to poisoning channels of communication it had with the Iraqi high command. Through intelligence networks, the Saddam leadership was informed that the American military had activated its own contacts with the Turkish army and was confident of the generals bringing the parliamentarians to see sense. This was an intrinsically convincing and persuasive story. Historically the Turkish army had always had the last word in the Kemalist state; its leadership was strongly pro-American (though less pro-British) and pro-NATO; it also retained something of its old imperialist attitude to its former Arab subjects. The Arabs, for their part, held the Turkish army in healthy respect; they recognized its formidable fighting power and were highly conscious of its ability to bring politicians to heel when that was thought to be in the national interest. Indeed, under Nuri al-Sa’id, who embodied Ottoman military tradition, they had had first-hand experience of the interventionist power of generals in state affairs. As a result the subtle subversion of intelligence channels paid off. American intelligence peddled the story that, if only at the last moment, the Turkish parliament would bow to military pressure and agree to grant transit rights to American troops; and, as a result, Saddam judged it too dangerous to withdraw his regular forces from Kurdistan, thus assuring indirectly some if not all of the effect that would have been achieved by positioning 4th Infantry Division in the north.
Nevertheless, General Franks’s Central Command headquarters, located for the coming operation at Doha in Qatar, had to plan the invasion of Iraq as a one-front operation, with the attacking forces launched into Iraqi territory from the extreme south. Thanks to the steadfast co-operation of the Kuwaitis, the two large American formations, 1st Marine Expeditionary Force and 3rd Infantry Division, could be positioned to cross directly into Iraq over the Iraqi–Kuwait frontier, as could the heavy part of the British contingent. The other part, the British 3rd Commando Brigade, would land by sea from the Gulf onto the Fao peninsula south of Baghdad, together with American troops, all tasked to seize the port of Umm Qasr and capture the rich Rumaila oil fields before the wells could be set afire. The British contingent, heavy and light elements together, would then advance to seize Basra, Iraq’s second city, while the American Marines and 3rd Mechanized Division set out northward to defeat the Iraqi army and seize the capital of Baghdad.
There lay the second problem. Not only is Iraq a difficult country to invade from the south, because of the narrowness of the point of entry, it is also a difficult country to conquer, because of the distance from the point of entry to Baghdad, over 300 miles to the north. Not only is distance an obstacle; so too is the intervening geography. Iraq – or Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers – is both encircled and defended by the waters of the Euphrates and Tigris, which combine at Basra to form the Shatt el-Arab estuary. The rivers meander, spill out into the floodplain and collect tributaries, so that any invader making his way northward is confronted by the need either to capture bridges if he is to advance or to bridge himself if the permanent bridges are destroyed. The two main highways northward, Routes 1 and 7, follow the Euphrates and Tigris respectively, but an invader must also get control of the interconnections, Routes 17 and 27, and such parallel highways as Routes 8 and 9. The land is almost completely flat; between Baghdad and Basra it descends only 34 metres in 338 kilometres (112 feet in 210 miles). The flatness of the river plain theoretically permits speed but also exposes the invader to defensive fire at long range whenever a built-up area impedes the advance.
One method of ensuring rapidity of advance was to repeat the pattern of the First Gulf War and precede ground operations by a prolonged and crushing air offensive. There were good reasons to judge such an operation undesirable. In 1991 the Iraqi army had been deployed by Saddam beyond the borders of his own territory in unvegetated and uninhabited desert. Its positions were clearly marked to observation by overflying coalition aircraft by the entrenchments, including high sand berms, thrown up by the Iraqi invaders of Kuwait. While they invited bombardment, they provided little protection to their occupants. The result was that between 17 January and 24 February 1991 the Iraqi invaders were devastated by a relentless campaign of heavy bombing, supplemented by point attacks on exposed equipment by strike aircraft. Enormous damage was inflicted on Iraqi military personnel exclusively, without any ‘collateral’ effect on civilian targets.
In 2003 the air forces, particularly the USAF, argued energetically for a repetition of the 1991 air campaign. General Franks opposed the scheme. He had several reasons for so doing. First was the geographical factor. Though in 1991 the air campaign undoubtedly so softened the defences that the ground forces thereafter had little to do, its effect was enhanced by the concentration of the Iraqi army in a confined area. In 2003, by contrast, the Iraqi forces were dispersed widely across Iraqi national territory, did not present a ‘target-rich’ strike pattern and invited ‘collateral’ damage to civilian targets that would have ensured a hostile media reaction. Second, there was the time factor. A prolonged preliminary air campaign would have given Saddam room to mobilize Middle Eastern and Third World opinion against the war, as well as the opportunity to sabotage his own oil facilities and cause widespread ecological damage by flooding the Gulf with emissions of crude oil. Third, an air campaign protracted in time would have put the Iraqi army on alert, heightened its responses and perhaps made the subsequent ground campaign less rather than more easy to win. Finally, by opening the war with a time-consuming air campaign, while the ground troops remained massed in the constricted area of Kuwait, Saddam would be given both opportunity and cause to use weapons of mass destruction against them. Belief in Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction not only provided the motivation for the war but, in the preliminary stages, heavily influenced the strategy by which it would be fought.
The strategy eventually chosen, therefore, was for a brief air campaign timed to coincide with the initial ground attack. Its distinctive characteristic – and the justification for its brevity – was to be the very precision of the weaponry delivered. Since 1991 there had been a revolution in accuracy, promising the results sought by air forces since the dawn of strategic bombing but only rarely achieved. In the First Gulf War only ten per cent of the munitions delivered by air, whether air-dropped bombs, air-launched missiles or sea- or land-launched cruise missiles, had been ‘smart’. In the Iraq War, the proportion was to be seventy per cent, the majority guided either by laser or by Global Positioning Satellite (GPS). The first system requires the target to be identified by laser illumination, which the munition detects, the second is directed very precisely to a chosen spot on the ground. An important development since 1991 was that of fitting guidance systems to munitions which lacked propulsion, thus turning a ‘dumb’ bomb into a weapon as accurate as a cruisemissile at a fraction of its cost. One was the Joint Stand Off Weapon (JSOW), another the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM). A third weapon, CBU-97 WCMD (Cluster Bomb Unit 97 Wind Corrected Munitions Dispenser), ejected armour-penetrating bomblets from a height, which then guided themselves onto the thin upper armour of vehicles within their search area.
The ready availability of such high-precision weapons, delivered by aircraft as diverse as the B-2 Stealth Bomber, the B-1 and the veteran B-52, averted the need to stage blanket bombardments which had preceded the First Gulf War or to attack civilian infrastructure targets, such as power stations, a programme that had attracted a bad press during the anti-Milosevic operations in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. The air war could be, and was, directed almost exclusively at military targets, though in the opening stage, widely described as that of ‘shock and awe’, the headquarters and administrative buildings of the Iraqi government and Ba’ath party were deemed to be military targets. General Franks, in the aftermath of the war, denied to me that he had ever sought to create ‘shock and awe’ or include those effects in his strategic plan.
The plan foresaw the disarming of Iraqi forces by air action while the ground offensive was in its early stage of development. Even before the ground forces had begun to move, however, General Franks had begun to neutralize Iraqi resistance by subversive activity against the command structure of the Iraqi divisions directly opposed to the coalition forces across the Iraq–Kuwait border. Intelligence agents had got into contact with the commanders of the six Iraqi divisions deployed furthest south, including the 51st Mechanized, and the 11th Infantry, and had urged them not to fight – with, according to General Franks, some success. Certainly, once the coalition began to push forward, the Iraqi divisions in the south melted away without offering serious resistance.
General Franks meanwhile was also inserting special forces through the frontier defences with orders to reach and neutralize the key bridges across the rivers. He assigned forty-eight special forces groups to these and other tasks, the majority American but including British and Australian units also. Special Operations Task Force 20, supported by an American Ranger regiment, and numbering 4,000 men, operated in the Iraqi desert west of the Euphrates, with the aim of cutting Iraqi routes into Syria and taking possession of the ‘Scud pans’. The Scud, though a mobile system, needs to be erected on an area of hard ground against which its rocket gases can push. Such ‘pans’ are comparatively few and widely scattered in the desert area. During the First Gulf War special forces attempted to attack the Scud threat by finding and eliminating the launchers themselves, a frustrating task given the ease with which they could be moved and hidden. The decision, in the Iraq war, to focus attention on potential launch sites proved much more fruitful. Very few of Saddam’s surviving Scuds were launched against coalition targets and none against surrounding countries, such as Israel.
The conventional offensive had more substantial objectives. There were to be two main thrusts, by 3rd Infantry Division out of Kuwait up the Euphrates valley, with the division’s vehicles covering ground across the desert before swinging back to join the main roads and advance on Baghdad via Karbala. The 1st Marine Expeditionary Force would simultaneously push up from Kuwait along Route 1, via Jalibal and Nasiriyah, between the Euphrates and Tigris, but send one of its regiments to reach the Tigris at Kut (scene of a British military disaster at the hands of the Turks in the First World War) before taking Route 6, also to arrive at Baghdad. Task Force Tarawa would shadow 1st Marine Expeditionary Force to secure the southern towns. Troops of the 82nd Airborne and 101st Air Assault Divisions would intervene to secure objectives short of Baghdad. In a separate operation altogether, the British 1st (UK) Armoured Division, with its air assault and commando brigades, would seize and secure the lower waters of the great rivers and capture Basra, Iraq’s second city. The operations were planned in great detail, a key element being the preparation of re-supply. American forces excel at logistics. The advance of both 3rd Infantry Division and 1st MEF was predicated on the principle of their advancing at the highest possible speed, brushing aside resistance and halting to fight only when absolutely necessary, but pausing at regular intervals of a day or two for the logistic train of fuel, ammunition and resupply vehicles to make good their wants in a rapid disgorging of necessities. British observers who travelled with the Americans have testified to the awesomeness of the spectacle. ‘The armour had halted,’ a British colonel described to me, ‘dozens of vehicles abreast in the first line and dozens more in the lines behind them. Suddenly out of the dust appeared every logistic vehicle you can imagine, tankers, water bowsers, ammunition trucks, mobile repair workshops, ration trucks. As they stopped, crews began connecting up hoses, hoisting pallets, throwing off crates. The contents were seized by the combat troops and disappeared inside the fighting vehicles as fast as they could be stowed. Sooner than you could imagine the combat echelon was re-supplied and ready to move forward again.’ Re-supply, quite as much as firepower or air support, was to be the secret of the coalition’s overwhelming of Saddam’s forces.
The first objective of the coalition attack, however, did not require any large logistic effort to be reached, for it lay just inside Iraqi territory from the coalition concentration area in Kuwait. It was the Rumaila oil fields, after the great Kirkuk–Mosul fields in Kurdistan the richest in Iraq: about a thousand wells, occupying an area fifty miles long below Basra and parallel to the border with Iran. The most valuable of the fields pumped over two million barrels a day from over 300 wells, through twelve gas-oil separation plants, to a main pumping station at Zubayr, from which it was sent to the terminal in the Fao peninsula. It was vital to seize the gas-oil separation plants and the pumping station undamaged, since the postwar reconstruction of Iraq would require their output, which earned $40 million a day.
A team from 1st Battalion 7th Marines (1/7) was chosen to seize the installations and a detailed reconnaissance carried out, providing the attackers with a computer-simulated picture of the layout of the objectives and satellite photographs of the surroundings. The British provided a team of experts from the oil companies which had installed the machinery in the 1950s to take over as soon as the buildings were seized, check the machinery for sabotage and put it back into operation as quickly as possible.
On the day of the attack, 20 March, advanced 24 hours because of a last-minute decision to open the air attack on Baghdad early, 1/7 crossed the sand barriers marking the border between Iraq and Kuwait and, in the centre of an extended line of fifty battalionsized units, moving on a front of fifty kilometres (31 miles), raced towards the Rumaila fields. To the marines’ left was 3rd Infantry Division, to their right 1st (UK) Armoured Division. By early afternoon of March 21, 1/7 were in an attacking position, sixty kilometres inside Iraq and five short of their objective. They had met sporadic resistance and seen some knocked-out Iraqi armour but had not been seriously opposed. Suddenly, round a corner, the pumping station appeared to their front. The commander of C Company, 1/7, the sub-unit charged with the actual capture, halted his men while he made an appreciation. It was crucial not to start a fire-fight which might detonate tons of highly flammable oil and gas in the pipes. Ordering his vehicles’ engines to be switched off, he listened. All he could hear was shouting from inside the perimeter wall and all he could see were civilian workers milling about. Realizing with a flash of inspiration that they had shut the pumping equipment down, averting the risk of inflammation, he gave the order to assault. An engineer team blew a hole in the perimeter wall, his riflemen poured through. Another gap was opened in a wire fence. Within minutes the riflemen had seized the buildings inside and begun to round up the civilian workers. There were no military defenders. The British industrial experts were brought forward to examine the machinery. They reported that there had been some amateur sabotage but nothing that could not be easily repaired. Half an hour after the assault had begun the position was secured.
Later, at a short distance from the objective, 1/7 found twelve T-54 tanks and a collection of Soviet-supplied armoured fighting vehicles. They were securely dug in but had not fired their guns and had been abandoned by their crews, some of whom came out of hiding to surrender to the marines. It was an augury of the character of the fighting that was to unfold in the following days. Smoke rose from a few wellheads that had been torched but the oil fields and their vital machinery were intact. The operation to capture what had been christened ‘the Crown Jewels’ had been an outstanding success.
On 22 March the great ground armada proceeded north. The plan was for the British, with objectives in the Fao peninsula and then the prime aim of taking and occupying Basra, to wheel right, while 1st MEF and the army’s V Corps, of which 3rd Infantry Division was the main element, struck towards Baghdad. The enemy opposing the coalition forces were estimated at eight divisions. One, the 51st, had been destroyed or had disbanded itself during the fighting in the oil fields. By American estimation, its personnel had largely deserted. Desertion was thought to have occurred in two waves, encouraged by intelligence contact with the divisional commander. The first wave of desertions had been prompted by fear of coalition air attack and had happened despite its absence. The second wave, among the more stalwart, had begun when the sound of approaching American tanks was heard. The Iraqi soldiers, who were from the locality, had simply dropped their weapons, shed their uniforms and fled home.
After the collapse of 51st Division, five others remained in the south, stationed along the Tigris river. The marines were to stage a feint in their direction, a feint supported by the British move on Basra, and then to turn west into the central plain, leaving the Iraqis bypassed while 1st MEF and Task Force Tarawa pressed on towards Baghdad. The lead elements of 1st MEF were to concentrate against the town of Nasiriyah, where they would cross the Euphrates and proceed north to engage the two Republican Guard divisions defending the capital.
Nasiriyah is an important crossing place over the Euphrates. A combat historian travelling with 1st MEF described it as ‘a dingy, neglected collection of one- and two-storey cinder-block and mud houses sandwiched in square city blocks between the river and the Saddam Canal to the north. In essence an island two and a half miles square, Nasiriyah had bridges on its north and south ends: two on Route 7 through the heart of the city, and two on Route 8 – called Route Moe by Task Force Tarawa – that skirted the city’s eastern border.’ The plan to take and secure Nasiriyah had been made aboard ship by the staff of Task Force Tarawa, commanding 2nd and 8th Marines, before the deployment began. It required 1st Battalion 2nd Marines (1/2) to pass through the eastern edge of the city and seize one of the northern bridges. It was to be followed by another battalion which would secure the city allowing the 1st MEF – comprising the three regimental combat teams formed from 1st, 4th, 5th and 7th Marines – to pass through and continue the advance northward. There was to be plentiful helicopter and artillery support, and armour would also be available.
Careful planning failed, in circumstances fortunately unique during the Iraq War, to deliver the desired result. There was to be an unforeseen battle for Nasiriyah and it was to take a messy and costly form, seized on gleefully by anti-American elements in the Western media to demonstrate that the war was not going the coalition’s way. The Marines had anticipated trouble in Nasiriyah. They had even coined the term ‘Ambush Alley’ to describe what they expected there. Trouble came but not of the sort anticipated. The defending division, the 11th, deserted, as predicted. What the Marines had been led to believe was that the population was pro-Saddam. That was not so; they had risen against him in 1991, had been severely punished and had learnt prudence. Just as bad, however, was what occurred instead. Nasiriyah was chosen by the Ba’ath party and Saddam’s various militias as a productive place in which to stage resistance. During 22–23 March,fedayeen fighters began to arrive in the town by private transport – cars, motorcycles, taxis – and in Ba’ath party commandeered buses. Many of the fighters were not Iraqis but extremists from other Arab countries, poorly trained but anxious to die in a war against the West. They brought their usual paraphernalia – RPG-7 grenade launchers, Kalashnikov assault rifles and explosive charges.
Neither side was properly organized to conduct the battle that ensued. The Iraqi fighters were outsiders and lacked the local knowledge necessary to put Nasiriyah into a state of defence. On the other hand, the Americans had no desire to capture Nasiriyah. They merely wished to pass through as quickly as possible, seize the bridges and clear routes for the convoys following in their rear. It was a recipe for confusion and confusion quickly followed.
Three concentrations of American forces were converging on the Nasiriyah area: the 3rd Infantry Division in the lead, with its long logistic tail following; the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force; and Task Force Tarawa. They got intermingled. In darkness and swirling dust, a supply unit of 3rd Infantry Division, 507th Maintenance Company, missed a turning, drove into Nasiriyah towards the eastern bridge over the Euphrates and was shot up. Nine soldiers were killed and six captured. One was a woman, Private Jessica Lynch, who was to become an unwitting heroine of the Iraq War.
The news of 507th’s misadventure filtered back to Task Force Tarawa, still south of the city, which despatched 1st Battalion 2nd Marines (1/2) with a tank company to rescue the 507th’s survivors. It quickly got involved in street fighting, which slowed its progress, and its companies got separated. Five servicemen of the 507th were found alive, however, and later the burnt-out remains of their trucks. It was by then noon and 1/2’s commander, under pressure to hasten the advance from higher command, gave orders to rush the eastern bridge. His A Company seized it and B Company passed across but itself took a wrong turning beyond, found itself in a firefight with fedayeen and bogged several of its vehicles in soft ground. Meanwhile C Company tried to secure a farther bridge across the Saddam Canal. Half the company got across but a hit by an RPG set a vehicle in the centre of the column afire, leaving four of its amphibious tractors on one side, seven on the other. A large party of fedayeen appeared and began firing automatic weapons and grenade launchers at the stalled unit, killing several and wounding more. As officers and sergeants tried to organize a return of fire and evacuate the wounded, an American A-10 anti-tank aircraft passed overhead, shooting up several marine vehicles and wounding an already wounded marine; A-10 pilots had caused several serious ‘friendly fire’ incidents involving British troops during the First Gulf War but they had hitherto avoided attacking their own. Soon after the A-10 pass, two more amphibious tractors were blown up, apparently by Iraqi fire, and shooting continued throughout the afternoon. Not until five o’clock, when A Company appeared with tank support, did the fighting die down. It had been a horrible day for 1/2, an episode of military confusion almost at its worst. There was little blame to apportion, and the Iraqis could take no credit for their success. Their resistance was not planned or co-ordinated. They had merely profited from their enemy’s ignorance of local geography and choice of wrong turnings. The battle of Nasiriyah was a catalogue of errors.
The flavour of the fighting was caught by the account of Evan Wright, Rolling Stone’s reporter with 1st MEF’s reconnaissance battalion.
Just after sunrise our seventy-vehicle convoy rolls over the bridge on the Euphrates and enters An Nasiriyah. It’s one of those sprawling Third World mud-brick-and-cinder-block cities that probably looks pretty badly rubbled even on a good day. This morning, smoke curls from collapsed structures. Most buildings facing the road are pockmarked and cratered. Cobras (helicopters) fly overhead spilling machine-gun fire. Dogs roam the ruins … A few vehicles come under machine-gun and RPG fire. The [Marines] return fire and redecorate a building with about a dozen grenades fired from a Mark 19 [automatic grenade launcher]. In an hour we clear the outer limits of the city and start to head north. Dead bodies are scattered along the edge of the road. Most are men, enemy fighters, still with weapons in their hands .... There are shot-up cars with bodies hanging over the edges. We pass a bus smashed and burned, with charred remains sitting upright in some windows. There’s a man with no head in the road and a dead little girl, too, about three or four, lying on her back. She’s wearing a dress and has no legs.
Another reporter, Andrew North of the BBC, described the last evening of the fighting,
[We’re] on the city’s southern outskirts, near a fly-infested rubbish dump. Suddenly there was a screeching sound and four bright dots in the sky – Iraqi rockets heading our way. ‘Get down!’ someone shouted and everyone scattered, looking desperately for cover. Machine guns opened up as more rockets landed. When it was over, thirty marines had been injured, many in friendly fire because of the confusion. The Iraqis had used the cover of a sandstorm to get in close and mount another surprise assault.
‘Assault’ is a misnomer, a typical misuse of military language by a media man inexperienced in the events of warfare. An assault is a combination of fire and movement, culminating in an attempt to capture a position by troops pressing to close quarters. Assault was not the Iraqis’ style. Almost always they kept their distance, loosing off rounds haphazard and unsighted, dodging in and out of cover and hoping to inflict casualties by luck rather than skill.
The Marines, by contrast, did assault frequently once it had become clear, on the second and third day of the battle, that the city would have to be captured if its streets were to be secured for the passage of supply columns. In retrospect it would have been better to bypass Nasiriyah rather than allow it to become a bottleneck, by bridging the Euphrates below or above the position it occupied on the river. The bridging equipment was available, brought from the United States by specialist National Guard units from the southern states, where they practised the skills on the enormous waterways of the Mississippi and its tributaries. Whilst bridges were available, however, roads were not. The hard fact of the matter was that the roads north led through Nasiriyah and had to be taken if the speed of advance were to be maintained at a pace that would guarantee the rapid fall of the Saddam régime. So during 23–24 March Task Force Tarawa established a cordon around the city to prevent the infiltration of fresh bands of fighters and set about finding, capturing or killing the fedayeen and Ba’athists who were sustaining the resistance. As Task Force Tarawa passed into the city and began to demonstrate an American presence, its task was eased by the garnering of local intelligence. As snipers killedfedayeen in ambush positions, and special forces accompanying the task force seized control of dominant buildings and city blocks, the Shi’ite residents, who had no reason to love the Ba’ath or Saddam after his brutal repression of their community, began to supply information about the location of fedayeen positions and supply stores. The Marines on the ground were supported by Marine helicopter and aircraft crews in the air overhead. Piece by piece, the Iraqi control of the city started to collapse.
An encouraging and instantly celebrated benefit of Task Force Tarawa’s action was the recovery of Private Jessica Lynch from captivity. A very brave Iraqi, discovering that she was being held in a local hospital, where she had been taken wounded, visited the building to assess how closely she was guarded and then informed the Americans of what he had found. A snatch squad of marines, Navy SEALs (sea-air-land commandos) and army Rangers was formed, which successfully surrounded her place of captivity, staged a diversion to draw off her captors and extracted her to safety. The rescue was a model of how a small-scale military operation should be conducted. The same could not be said of media treatment of the event or of her story. Private Lynch was transformed into a Hollywood heroine, who had fought to the last round and then been barbarically mistreated. The truth was that, though she had undoubtedly defended herself and been badly wounded, she had little memory of her ordeal and her captors had treated her with care and consideration. The real hero of the episode, the Iraqi who had been instrumental in saving her, received little of the media credit he was due.
Not until the last days of March did Task Force Tarawa succeed in suppressing all resistance in Nasiriyah, securing the city and making it safe for the long supply columns following the marine spearhead racing towards Baghdad to transit safely. The localelement of the spearhead, to which Task Force Tarawa was acting as ‘force protection’, was 1st Marines, the main element of 1st Regimental Combat Team (RCT 1). Its mission once clear of Nasiriyah was to push on up Route 7, the main highway through the central valley, as far as Kut, on the Tigris, where it expected to find the Baghdad Division of the Republican Guard. After defeating or otherwise disposing of that division, it was to regroup for the final drive on the capital. Beyond Kut it would be rejoined by 5th and 7th Marines (RCT 5 and 7), which were scheduled to proceed in parallel to its left, up Route 1 until, beyond Dinaniyah, they would, at a point denoted as ‘the Elbow’, leave Route 1 and cross the central plain on Route 27 to concentrate with RCT 1 and advance on Sabat. Simultaneously the 3rd Infantry Division would move on the marines’ left up the Euphrates to reach the ‘Karbala gap’ between that city and Route 8, from which it would also launch its assault on Baghdad.
Nothing in war is predictable. Two factors now intervened to set back the timetable. One was the weather. The other was a shortage of supplies reaching 3rd Infantry Division. The supply shortage was subject to human correction. The weather was not. During the fight for Nasiriyah a dust storm – a shamal – began to blow, turning daytime to dusk and interfering with observation. As the lead elements of 1st MEF left the city and headed up Route 7 towards Kut, the shamal grew in strength. Iraq’s central valley, between the rivers, is an alluvial plain, its fertility renewed each year by silt brought by the snowmelt off the northern Zagros mountains. Immediately after winter much of the surface disappears under water, which lies in huge, shifting, shallow lakes. As the lakes disperse and dry, the silt lies loose on the surface, ready to be whipped up and driven in cutting clouds by the spring gales. All the invaders had suffered from dust clouds – sand in the Kuwait desert – as soon as they began to move. They had wrapped cloths around their heads to keep it out, to little effect. The sand, then the airborne silt, had penetrated everything, clogged mouths and lungs and caused an epidemic of coughing and spitting. The silt was worse than the sand. Because it carried a high concentration of decayed vegetable matter, it caused the soldiers to suffer low-grade fevers which lasted for several days until the sufferers adapted. The machinery did not adapt, nor did night-vision devices. Machinery clogged, sights could not penetrate the gloom. The march north from Nasiriyah was a misery, slowed by the dust storms which at times turned wet and cold as sleet and hail mixed in. At one stage, just north of Nasiriyah, the fedayeen profited from the conditions to stage a blocking attack. The high command in Baghdad had apparently heard of the marines’ difficulties in the city and organized reinforcements to join the battle. Arriving in civilian transport, and too late, they were stopped on Route 7 but manfully debussed, deployed and conducted one of the few genuine fire-and-movement engagements the Marines encountered anywhere in Iraq. It lasted two hours and left all the fedayeen, almost sixty in number, dead.
Even in the dust storm the three marine regimental combat teams pressed on, RCT 1 up Route 7, RCT 5 and 7 up Route 1 to its left, while the 3rd Infantry Division was moving with RCT 5 and 7 towards Karbala and the Baghdad outskirts. On 26 March, however, the command of 3rd Infantry Division, which had overextended its resources, decided that it would have to halt for resupply. The Marines, who have a tradition of travelling lighter than the army, did not need to pause. The divisional commander, Major General James Mattis, had arranged for C-130 tactical transport aircraft, carrying, 5,000-gallon fuel bladders, to land on the hard surface of Route 1, allowing the division’s vehicles to top up on the line of march.
The advance had, however, to be co-ordinated. Army and marine formations could not get out of phase. The capture of Baghdad could be guaranteed only if the two main formations, 3rd Infantry and 1st MEF, arrived at the final line of departure simultaneously. Feeble though Iraqi resistance was, the better Iraqi divisions, the Republican Guard, still lay to their front. They must not be offered the opportunity to engage the American forces in sequence, but must be forced to fight a solid concentration, and to do so under heavy air attack by the coalition air forces. A pause was necessary.
It was arranged on Thursday 27 March at 1st MEF headquarters by General James Conway, its commanding general, General William Wallace, commanding V Corps (3rd Infantry Division and attached army brigades) and General McKiernan (overall ground commander). Because the Marines were not short of supplies, they were reluctant to break the momentum of their advance. In the master plan, however, they were supporting V Corps, not conducting an independent mission. It was therefore agreed that they should pause, so as not to lose contact with 3rd Infantry Division, and that their lead element, RCT 5, should actually retrace its steps for twenty-three miles, having got too far ahead. There was an underswell of complaint among the Marines. They had heard that Wallace and McKiernan were both close friends and logistics experts, and suspected that they preferred to work by the book. The Marines knew that the USMC and the army worked by different rules. They regarded their own, which pared supply scales to the bone and ultimately allowed only for the movement of fuel, ammunition, food and water, as superior. They were also alarmed by rumours that the pause might last longer than the seventy-two to ninety-six hours officially forecast. Hints picked up from the BBC and American domestic radio suggested a pause of as much as eighteen to twenty-one days. To the Marines, who had made exceptional progress despite having to overcome resistance, and who felt the way ahead to be open if pressure were maintained, the prospect of a pause was highly unwelcome. Their commanders felt the same, seeing that the plan might be changed to make their thrust the main effort, with V Corps assuming the support role.
Changing plans in mid-campaign is not, however, to be recommended, unless there is an overwhelmingly powerful reason. At that stage of the Iraq War, there was no such reason. The enemy was not exerting significant resistance and was still vulnerable to the offensive effort General Franks had planned at the outset. It was therefore decided to proceed as foreseen, with the following differences. First, it would be necessary to clear up the tactical situation along the line of advance, reaching back to Nasiriyah; to do so, V Corps would deploy its reserves, 2 Brigade of 82nd Airborne Division, 2 and 3 Brigades of 101st Air Assault Division, to fight local battles at towns along Route 1. Second, the logistic organization would dump forward 3–4 days’ supply. Third, the divisions would have to organize reconnaissance in force, ahead of the main columns, to establish the strength and whereabouts of the defenders of Baghdad.
The 3rd Infantry Division, travelling partly on hard desert rather than paved roads to the west of the Euphrates, had already outstripped the 1st MEF to reach Najaf, short of its penultimate objective, the Karbala gap, between Karbala and Lake Razzazah, from which the route lay towards the capital. It had had difficulties, particularly during an attack by 11th Helicopter Regiment, supporting 3rd Infantry Division, on the supposed positions of the Medina Republican Guard Division near Najaf. Flying in appalling weather, the precursor of the great shamal, the 11th Helicopter Regiment had also had difficulty in refuelling and difficulty with its communications, having to rely at a critical stage on a single satellite radio link. As a result, the number of missions to be flown had to be reduced, as did the number of designated targets to be attacked. In the circumstances it was not surprising that the American helicopters flew into trouble, being engaged by heavy ground fire from the Medina Division’s positions; what was surprising was that only one of the thirty-two attacking Apache helicopters was shot down; many others, however, were hit and damaged.
The brigades of the two airborne divisions, 82nd and 101st, had great success in their mission to clear the left flank of the advance and suppress resistance in the towns, particularly Samawah and Najaf, on 3rd Infantry Division’s right. The advance elements were supported by the 69th Tank Battalion and the famed 7th Cavalry, Custer’s regiment at the Little Big Horn. The best reported of the engagements, however, was that of 325th Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division. The 325th had originally been glider infantry and had landed on the Cotentin peninsula on D-Day in 1944. Going to battle by glider had, even by the end of the Second World War, been recognized as too dangerous a means of transit to combat to be continued; the role of the glider infantryman was seen to be hazardous at best and little short of suicidal at worst. The glider regiments of 82nd and 101st Divisions, while keeping their numbers, were found other roles, either as parachute or heliborne units.
The 325th had begun the campaign on 25 March in Kuwait, then advanced, some of its personnel by road, some by helicopter, first to Tallil military air base inside Iraq and then to Samawah on the Euphrates, north-west of Nasiriyah. Halted short of Samawah on 27–28 March while the brigade plans and executes operations against the town, commanders and staff officers, observed by Karl Zinsmeister, an embedded journalist from American Enterprise magazine, discuss the appropriate degree of firepower to unleash. They are working on intelligence supplied by the CIA, which has local contacts, and reports that a meeting between two high-level Ba’ath party officials, organizing Samawah’s defence, is about to take place in a building to their front. The brigade intelligence officer and its judge advocate general, the legal officer responsible for enforcing rules of engagement, review the issues. ‘We’ve learned from [our] source that Muhayfen Halwan, the number-one Ba’ath party official in the Salwan region down on the Saudi border has come up to meet with Sultan Al-Sayf, the number-two guy in this region. As of 0915 this morning they were planning future ops in this compound.’
Intense discussion follows. There is a school 145 yards from the target, others within 220 yards. The CIA officer believes the schools are empty. Nevertheless the operations officers controlling the attack aircraft to be employed, fixed-wing strike aircraft and helicopters, fall into anxious debate about what weapons to employ. Should they be strike aircraft, delivering a 500-pound bomb, or attack helicopters, delivering an 18-pound Hellfire missile? The fire support officer states that ‘the smallest Air Force precision bomb has a five-hundred pound warhead, versus eighteen pounds of high explosive on a Hellfire. If we’re looking to minimize risks of destruction overflow, maybe that’s enough.’ The judge advocate counters that, ‘On the other hand, there’s a big political and psychological component to this strike, and if we’re trying to send a message, a bigger boom is better – so long as we’re comfortable we’re not gonna get unwanted collateral damage.’ While the debate continues, General Wallace, the commanding general of V Corps, appears at the conference to be briefed. While he listens, a forward air controller in one of the large overflying AWACS aircraft intervenes. He seems to be arguing for the use of a 2,000-lb satellite-guided bomb. Then he modifies the order, apparently as a result of discussion with Central Command. The decision now is for a Hellfire strike.
Half an hour after the conference began, the helicopter pilots report that three missiles have been fired. Their high-definition sensors report the results. The target building has been holed but is still standing and a truck with three occupants has made its escape. The conclusion is that the ‘bad guys’ may have got away. Zinsmeister, a close observer throughout the tactical conference, is impressed by the care taken not to do more damage than is necessary and to avoid causing civilian casualties. Next day, 2 April, he gets first-hand reports of contrary efforts made by the fedayeen to involve civilians. Some use an ambulance to mount an attack on an American post, others seize women and children off the street to protect a target about to be attacked by an American aircraft. In retrospect he reviews 325th Infantry Regiment’s work in Samawah during the week: ‘basic infantry blocking and tackling, but much of it is the more delicate and tricky work of urban warfare – clearing intersections and buildings, taking and holding bridges, draining sniper’s nests, smashing mortar and machine-gun sites hidden in residential neighbourhoods.’
The care taken to avoid causing hurt to innocents is not casual. Before the first assault to clear Samawah of fedayeen and Ba’athists, Zinsmeister witnesses 325’s ‘rock drill’, a tactical conference on the coming battle, so called because pieces of rock are used to mark key points on a tent floor, with parachute cord, stretched to show map grid lines that would show up on GPS indicators. Pieces of cardboard, bricks and piles of sand were added to the improvised map to stand for other features and locations. When the improvised model – familiar from classroom seminars in all officer and NCO training schools – was ready, the platoon and squad leaders clustered round, to be talked through the operation that would shortly unroll on the real terrain it represented.
During the rest of 3 April and the beginning of the night of 4 April the preparations for the final advance and capture of Samawah continue. Intelligence reports indicate that Karim Handany, a member of Saddam’s inner circle and a four-star uniformed general in the Republican Guard, had come down from Baghdad ‘to organize the local resistance. Street intersections had been built up with fighting positions. Machine-gun units were dug in and sandbagged in many locations. RPGs and ammunition were stashed in scores of buildings across the northern neighbourhoods’, which had not yet been taken. The troop leaders give their last orders:
Hot spots, check points and problem buildings are identified. Decisions are made on which squads should attack each. Snipers are assigned positions on high buildings. There is heavy emphasis on the rule of engagement, on fields of fire and physical operational limits, all of which are carefully calculated to avoid fratricide or collateral civilian damage.
At 0435 on the morning of 4 April the final assault on north Samawah begins.
The alleys are narrow, and dark windows and doors threaten from every direction. The squad clings to opposite sides of the street, scanning the rooftops and windows through gunsights as they make their way toward the river. A machine gunner is posted at each intersection. Gradually the troops clear out critical buildings. First the door is blown off with a shotgun, or the door is blasted open with C4 explosive. Then each room is swept at riflepoint. Most structures seem empty, but some have young men or families in them, who are gathered up for relocation to a safer quadrant farther back, and in some cases for questioning. Nearby, booms and machine gun bursts as adjoining squads encounter fire.
So, painstakingly, block by block, house by house, north Samawah is cleared. The infantrymen of 325th are alert to the appearance of ‘technicals’, a term learnt in Somalia, signifying a pickup truck carrying automatic weapons. There are other enemy mobile units, including taxis and civilian buses. By the afternoon of 4 April, however, Samawah has been emptied of hostile fighters, at a cost to the 82nd Airborne Division of one American soldier dead and twenty wounded. Zinsmeister is encouraged to hope that the rest of the campaign in Iraq, leading to the capture of Baghdad, can be concluded at equally low cost.
The operations of 82nd Division were replicated by those of its brother formation, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault). On March 30, Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters of the 101st, flying 250 sorties, airlifted two brigades of the division to positions from which Najaf and Hillah, on Highways 9 and 8, could be assaulted. The operation was sensitive, for Najaf was the site of the Golden Dome Mosque of Ali, tomb of the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, a site of particular sensitivity to Shi’a Muslims. It was also protected by a mountainous escarpment which had been reinforced with fighting positions. The capture of both places was, nevertheless, essential, since they protected the routes up the Euphrates valley to the outskirts of Baghdad and had to be cleared if the rear area of 3rd Infantry Division were not to be attacked by pockets of fedayeen lurking in the two cities.
The 101st Airborne Division is, like the 82nd, one of the most famous fighting organizations in American military history. The 82nd, because of its nationwide recruitment during the Second World War, was known as the All-American; the 101st called itself the Screaming Eagles. With the 82nd it had jumped on D-Day, and its infantry regiments, the 327th, 501st, 502nd and 506th, had won a reverberating roll of battle honours. In the Vietnam era it had changed role, ceasing to parachute and acquiring helicopters to make it an air assault formation. Its airborne ethos remained unchanged; like those of the 82nd, its soldiers call the rest of the infantry ‘legs’ and cultivate an air of superiority.
The operation to secure Highways 8 and 9 began at Najaf, where Major General David Petraeus, 101st’s commanding general, deployed three battalions of his 1st Brigade, supported by a tank battalion, 1-70 Armour, to enter the city from the south. The northern approaches were covered by his 2nd Brigade. Though short of armour, Petraeus had plentiful air support, provided by his own divisional helicopters, Apaches and OH-58D Kiowa Warriors, reinforced by airforce and navy fixed wing strike aircraft. An early task was to destroy Ba’ath party headquarters, done with precision by the dropping of two JDAMs. The JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munition) is a conventional ‘dumb’ bomb, to which is attached a GPS guidance unit and fins, which allows it to achieve a very high degree of terminal accuracy at a fraction of the cost of that of a cruise missile. The battle for Najaf took the form of a block-by-block clearance of the streets, under a protective umbrella of helicopters which provided close fire support and direct observation, guiding the infantry to points of resistance. Outside the city the Apaches, with their heavy armament, destroyed over 200 enemy vehicles. By 1 April, two days after the operation had begun, Najaf was secure.
The focus then shifted north to Hillah, with several objects. One was to support the marine operation at the Tigris crossing. A second was to protect the development of 3rd Infantry Division’s attack on Baghdad from the direction of Karbala, farther north. Both missions would involve the 101st in combat with the Hammurabi Republican Guard Division, which had sent armour and infantry from the capital to defend its southern approaches. In one of the few episodes of organized resistance staged by the Iraqi conventional forces, 101st’s infantry and supporting armour would be forced to fight step by step, relying on artillery bombardment as well as tank gunnery and air support to reduce the defences as the strongpoints were identified. The Iraqis also deployed artillery, requiring the Americans to mount counter-battery fire, directed by radar that refers incoming fire to its point of origin. Fighting persisted in Hillah and its surrounding area from 2 to 10 April; only after eight days of often intense combat could General Petraeus report that Hillah was clear of enemy and secure. The battle, though not costly in American lives, had consumed an enormous amount of ordnance, including 1,000 Hellfire anti-armour missiles, launched from helicopters, 2,000 conventional artillery rounds, 155mm and 105mm, fired by 321st Artillery Regiment, and 114 ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System), a rocket discharged from the Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS), with a longer range and heavier warhead than the MLRS standard missile. Army and air force aircraft had flown 135 close support missions, against bunkers and fortified buildings, while the division’s helicopters had destroyed 256 air-defence sites and vehicles, 110 guns and rocket launchers, 287 armoured vehicles, 800 other vehicles and many bunkers and other fire positions. Although the elements of the Hammurabi Division had fought better than most Iraqi troops encountered, they had lacked both the skills and the firepower to put up an effective defence.
The way to Baghdad was now open. The objectives yet to be taken – the Karbala gap, between that town and its reservoir fed from the Hadimah Dam, Baghdad International Airport, and the terminal points of the highways leading into the city – all lay within the metropolitan area. The rest of Saddam’s kingdom was in the possession of the coalition forces. In the Kurdish north, never fully under Saddam’s control, a coalition of Kurdish fighters, the peshmerga, coalition special forces and conventional American formations, notably the 173rd Airborne Brigade, had crushed the Ba’athist organization and was in control both of the countryside and the major cities. Part of the Sunni heartland, around Tikrit north of Baghdad, remained to be occupied but the behaviour of its population was not affecting the development of the campaign. In the Shi’a south the British element of the coalition force committed to Operation Iraqi Freedom had, after seizing the Fao peninsula and the port of Umm Qasr, entered and secured Basra. The liberation of Iraq from the monstrous dictatorship of Saddam Hussein was almost complete.