8
The pause at the end of March, which had slowed the advance of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force and halted the 3rd Infantry Division, encouraged many media commentators, particularly in Europe, to suggest that the campaign had run out of impetus. Particularly so in France, where the public and the opinion makers were as hostile to the war as the government. Enlisement was a term that began to be applied, a word with special resonance for the French since it had been used to characterize the bogging-down of their army in IndoChina, in the first European war against Ho Chi Minh and General Giap fifty years earlier. Le Monde, organ of official opinion and of the ruling class, announced on 27 March that President Bush had been ‘forced to revise his plans in the face of Iraqi resistance’. The French provincial press gloated over even gloomier predictions, forecasting a lengthening war and heavier casualties. Much was made of the forcing down of an American helicopter, allegedly by an elderly Arab with an antiquated rifle, who may merely have witnessed a case of engine failure. In Britain, too, there was a search by the media for sensationalist bad news. Antony Beevor, the author of a bestselling account of the battle of Stalingrad, was obliged to tell a newspaper executive who attempted to engage him to write about the coming battles of Saddamgrad, meanwhile swearing him to secrecy at the originality of the idea, that nine other newspapers were ahead of him and, anyhow, that he foresaw no Stalingrad in Baghdad.
The pause had causes quite different from those identified by anti-American journalists. It had been brought about by bad weather and the need for resupply. Minor military setbacks apart, such as the difficulty of negotiating passage through Nasiriyah and of suppressing ill-organized resistance in other towns on the roads up, the Americans had achieved a pace of advance unprecedented in history, far outstripping that of the Germans towards Moscow in the summer of 1941 and even that of the British from the Seine to the liberation of Brussels in the victorious summer of 1944, following the breakout from Normandy. The Americans had suffered almost no casualties – so much for French predictions of ‘heavier casualties’ – and virtually no equipment losses. Their generals, moreover, were in no way discountenanced by the need to pause. Even as they accepted the necessity and organized the rush forward of resupply, they were planning the next stage of the operation.
Thus far it was the Marines who appeared to have been in the forefront, because they had been reducing resistance in the central valley, taking towns and travelling on paved roads, the modern highways which were Saddam’s contribution to Iraq’s communication network. The 3rd Infantry Division, by contrast, had been pushing northward on the edge of hard desert above the alluvial plain. Because the going was good, it had made excellent progress but the nature of the terrain entailed higher fuel consumption and more vehicle breakdowns. The marines had been able to re-fuel by landing C-130 aircraft, with 5,000-gallon diesel bladders, direct onto the surface of the highways. The 3rd Infantry Division, travelling on surfaces too hazardous for aircraft landings, required refuelling by wheeled tankers and also needed to set up fuel depots from which to refill. Hence, in part, the pause.
Once the pause for resupply had been completed and other stores of food, water and ammunition dumped forward, a miracle of American logistic expertise deeply impressive to attached British officers, and essential repairs and servicing completed, 3rd Infantry Division was ready by 30 March to recommence its drive on Baghdad. At the command conference on 26 March between Generals McKiernan, Conway and Wallace, directing the operations respectively of the whole ground force, the Marines and V Corps, comprising 3rd Infantry Division and its other attached army units, it had been agreed that the Marines should continue their push up the central valley, sticking to the paved roads, while 3rd Infantry Division, with the brigades of 82nd and 101st clearing up resistance in its rear, should press on to the Karbala Gap. The V Corps operation would have five objectives. An armoured cavalry element of 3rd Infantry Division, 3/7 Cavalry, with two of the division’s brigade combat teams, would lead the drive into the gap itself. The rest of 3rd Infantry Division would advance out of the desert to capture the bridges over the Euphrates south of Karbala. Then the brigades of 101st Air Assault Division would make raids in force farther south on the Euphrates and another part of 101st would mount a probing attack into the desert west of Karbala. Apart from the drive into the Karbala Gap, the subsidiary operations were intended either to capture essential objectives or to mislead the Iraqi high command as to the attackers’ purposes.
The plan also had the purpose of confronting the Republican Guard, deployed outside Baghdad, with a direct military threat. The threat was double-edged. As explained to me by General Franks in the immediate aftermath of the war, the plan was to ‘shape’ the battlefield outside Baghdad, by using the advance of ground forces to hold the Republican Guard in place while heavily bombing its rear as a warning that, if it attempted to retreat into the city, it would suffer an even worse fate than having to engage in combat with the American armoured units. The ‘shaping’ plan was partly material and partly psychological in design. Its object was to deter the Republican Guard from disappearing into the built-up area, where it might indeed have created a ‘Saddamgrad’, by representing inactivity – staying where it was, with the chance of surrendering to the advancing Americans – as preferable to decamping, which would ensure its being carpet bombed, as during the First Gulf War.
The plan was also intended to persuade the Iraqi high command – always supposing that it remained operational, which seemed increasingly unlikely as the war drew out – that the American attack on Baghdad would come from an unexpected direction, not out of the desert above Karbala, but indeed through the Karbala Gap. The plan also drew attention away from the approach of the Marines on the eastern flank of the city, up the Tigris.
What the Americans were preparing was a classic pincer movement, but baiting the trap so that Saddam and his sons Qusay and Uday, who had apparently supplanted in authority the senior generals as the crisis heightened, would be unable to identify from which direction the disabling blow would come. If they reacted as expected, by failing to move the Republican Guard into the capital, it would not matter what decisions they took thereafter. The fall of the city’s approaches would guarantee the success of a penetrative operation to its heart.
The preliminaries to the advance into Baghdad must be the seizure of the Karbala Gap, whose shoulders were formed by Lake Razzazah and the Euphrates and up which ran Highway 8, the main road into the southwestern suburbs, and the capture of Baghdad (Saddam) International Airport, known to be of the greatest symbolic significance to the régime but which was also of high military value, its runways and facilities providing means for direct airlifted reinforcement and resupply of the forward troops. The attack on the gap was to be led by the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of 3rd Infantry Division, which had been relieved by the brigade of 82nd Airborne Division from duty on the lines of communication southward to Kuwait.
The topography of the Karbala Gap had been much studied by the US Army ever since its strategic focus had turned to the Middle East at the beginning of the 1990s. Plans to penetrate it had been practised in war games and tactical exercises without troops at all major army study centres, just as the Fulda Gap had been endlessly studied during the days of the Cold War, when US Seventh Army had stood on the defensive opposite the Group of Soviet Forces Germany in Central Europe. The Fulda Gap is the gateway to the Rhine for any invader coming westward out of what used to be the People’s Republic of (East) Germany. Now the boot was on the other foot. Seventh Army – to which 3rd Infantry Division and the rest of V Corps in Iraq belonged – had to mount an offensive through a similar gap, and to traverse it at the highest speed, leaving no time for Saddam, Qusay and Uday to reposition forces to oppose it. Speed was of the highest importance because of the danger that the Iraqi engineer corps, the most competent part of Saddam’s armed forces, might blow the Hadithah dam, flooding the plain of the upper Euphrates and turning it into a swamp impenetrable by armoured troops. The terrain was naturally waterlogged and had been improved as an obstacle zone by the Iraqi engineers.
The first task was to take and hold the Hadithah dam, a task assigned to army Ranger units, specialist infantry trained on commando lines. They were initially instructed only to take the dam and then pass on. On reconsideration General Franks decided that the dam had to be held against the danger of counter-attack, in the event proving a sensible precaution. The Iraqis, using troops drawn from the Republican Guard, did counter-attack and the Rangers had to endure two weeks of heavy combat, during which they were severely shelled as well as subjected to repeated attacks. Troops of the 101st Airborne Division eventually relieved them.
The next task was to secure the crossings over the Euphrates east of Karbala, near Hindiyah. There was also a dam on the Euphrates at Hindiyah which it was important to save from destruction. Manoeuvre along this stretch of the Euphrates was difficult. The river banks were high, the surrounding ground marshy, and the defending troops, drawn from the Republican Guard, proved of better than usual quality. During 1–2 April, 3rd Infantry Division was engaged in heavy combat, its helicopters providing continuous close support and the divisional artillery putting down heavy bombardment. On 1 April the division’s 3rd Brigade, with two armoured battalions forward, took control of the eastern outskirts of Karbala, while the 1st Brigade manoeuvred to attack from the other side. The culmination of the division’s mission was the seizure of the Euphrates dams and bridges but swampy terrain made progress difficult.
By 2 April Iraqi resistance had been sufficiently overcome for the divisional commander, General Buford Blount, to begin planning a crossing of the Euphrates. He hoped that the intensity of his attack thus far had so knocked about the defence that it would be possible to capture a bridge on the run. The Iraqis had, as elsewhere on the great waterways, neglected to blow up the vital spans, perhaps deterred by the coalition special forces which were operating in strength in the area, perhaps because helicopter surveillance threatened demolition parties with attack. On the afternoon of 2 April, a tank unit, 3-69 Armour, reported that it had got three tanks across a bridge prepared for demolition but not yet destroyed.
The defence of river lines is notoriously difficult. Defenders are reluctant to destroy bridges which might leave friendly troops on the wrong side or be needed later for a counter-attack. It is also difficult, in the heat of action, to keep count of which bridges remain under the control of one’s own side. Such failure was largely at the root in May 1940 of the French army’s loss of crossings over the River Meuse, which resulted in the collapse of the Ninth Army and the beginning of the blitzkrieg. Something similar occurred on the Euphrates during March 2003. The Iraqi engineers failed to detonate the charges they had already placed in position. After the appearance of American tanks on their own side of the river, they did detonate the bridge, only for it to survive the explosions. They had miscalculated the solidity of its construction. The attacking Americans cut the wires leading to some unexploded charges and destroyed the positions in which the Iraqi engineers still sheltered. Shortly after the abortive detonations, 3-69 Armour had positioned three companies of armoured vehicles on the Baghdad bank and was ready to advance. Behind the point units, two alternative crossings were quickly thrown across the Euphrates, a medium-girder bridge to reinforce that damaged by the Iraqi engineers and a floating pontoon bridge parallel to it. The ponderous bridging trains, which had trailed behind the spearheads during the lightning advance, had begun to demonstrate their usefulness.
Once across the Euphrates, the leading tanks and armoured fighting vehicles of 3rd Infantry Division quickly reached the international airport complex. The airport is an example of how in Iraq the ultramodern and the antediluvian intermingle. Outside the airport complex the landscape has scarcely changed since the days of the Kings of Babylon – the site of whose capital lies just beyond it. The countryside presents a spectacle of sluggish irrigation canals, mud houses and palm groves. The airport itself is approached by concrete roads, interchanges and over- and underpasses. As the armoured vanguard approached the airport to take up attacking positions, fighting focused on two concrete intersections to the west, between the runways and the Euphrates. The American armoured units formed a defensive perimeter around the two intersections and awaited attack. It soon came. Saddam and his sons, or whoever was still directing the Iraqi defensive effort, correctly recognized that the appearance of the vanguard of 3rd Infantry Division at the airport presaged the downfall of the régime. Throughout the afternoon and evening of 3 April, successive waves offedayeen – not the Republican Guard, which appears to have been engaged against the Marines farther to the east, certainly not the regular army, which had almost ceased to exist – launched attacks from north, east and west. They appeared in any form of transport to hand, cars, trucks, buses, or mounted on motorcycles. Their attacks were not conventional or co-ordinated military assaults. There was no support by armour or artillery. The fedayeen behaved like the martyrs they claimed to be, firing assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades in unorganized rushes on the American positions, until over 400 of them lay dead on the battleground.
On 4 April fedayeen attacks became better organized. Tanks appeared, manned either by the fedayeen themselves or by the Republican Guard or remnants of the regular army. The Americans around the Abu Ghraib expressway began to take on Iraqi armour with their vehicle-mounted guns, the 120mm cannon of their Abrams tanks or the 25mm chain guns of their Bradley armoured fighting vehicles. Bradleys had not been built to engage tanks; they were up-gunned and up-armoured versions of the previous generation of armoured personnel carriers, supposed to be protected by their own tanks in manoeuvre engagements. The chain guns, however, proved remarkably effective at engaging T-72 tanks, Soviet-supplied vehicles which were supposed to be the best in the Iraqi army. The Bradleys were also supported by strike aircraft. The Bradley chain guns destroyed five T-72s. Later on 4 April Abrams tanks advanced to engage T-72s reported by the supporting aircraft to be sheltering under the concrete roadways. At ranges of a thousand metres (1,093 yards) or more, the Abrams gunners knocked out sixteen T-72s, completing the destruction of the whole Iraqi tank force that had been sent against them.
Intelligence assessments now persuaded General Blount that he had achieved both his current operational aims, the domination of the international airport and the opening of the approach into Baghdad from the west. He therefore decided to press forward from his positions encircling the airport and take it under control. By the evening of 4 April his 4th Brigade Combat Team was inside the perimeter, probing for resistance. The forward edge of reconnaissance was provided by his units of the 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments. By early in the morning of 5 April his advanced elements were in control of the runways and the international terminal.
There had been some resistance from men on foot, perfectly pointless against the columns of American armoured vehicles. As soon, however, as the division was securely in place, Iraqi armour appeared on the airport outskirts and began an attack to retake it. It was a futile undertaking. Not only were the remnants of the Republican Guard and regular army outclassed at every organizational level from the top downward by the Americans, the obsolescence of their equipment condemned them to be massacred. During the Iraqi counter-attack on the airport, T-72s and early Cold War vintage T-55s appeared, to oppose not only Bradleys but M1A1 Abrams, the most advanced tanks in the world, armed with 120mm guns directed by laser range-finders. Twelve T-72s, two T-55s and six other armoured vehicles were knocked out in the course of the fighting, at no cost to the Americans at all.
After the defeat of the Iraqi armoured counter-attack, the American high command deemed a brief pause to consider operational options. Memories of previous bad experiences of city fighting, in Hue in Vietnam and Mogadishu in Somalia, counselled caution to some. Generals Franks and McKiernan took a different view. The campaign thus far had achieved extraordinary results, the farthest advance at speed over distance ever recorded and the disintegration of an army twice the size of the invading force. Superior equipment and organization supplied many of the reasons why such success had been won. Besides material and technical factors, however, moral and psychological dimensions had been at work. Daring and boldness had played parts in the campaign as significant as dominance in the air, greater firepower or higher mobility on the ground. Franks and McKiernan were now convinced that the opposition had lost, if it had ever possessed, the means to organize an effective defence of Baghdad. Permission was given to launch deep reconnaissance probes – ‘thunder runs’ – into the centre of the city.
The two American generals may have been influenced by the example of the British operation which had successfully secured Basra, in turn itself modelled on earlier operations in Northern Ireland. They may independently have come to the conclusion that raids into the city would not be effectively opposed by what remained of Saddam’s forces. Whatever the inspiration, in the early morning of 5 April 3rd Infantry Division’s armoured spearhead, 1st Battalion 64th Armoured Regiment (1-64), moved out of its overnight positions to attack up Highway 8 directly into the southern suburbs, with the ‘régime district’ of ministries and residential palaces as its objective.
Central Baghdad was still full of fighters of various denominations, Saddam Fedayeen, Republican Guard, regular army and foreign fanatics; the intelligence staff’s assessment was that only two Republican Guard brigades and 15,000 fedayeen remained available to Saddam, who had apparently transferred control of the defence to his two sons, Uday and Qusay, neither qualified to direct fast-moving military operations. Few of the defenders on the morning of 5 April, moreover, were prepared for the appearance of the Americans. Iraqi disinformation had done them a disservice. Though denials by the Minister of Information, Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, soon to be celebrated about the world as ‘Comical Ali’, that the invaders had reached the capital, mixed with assertions that they were being thrown back with heavy losses, brought heart to supporters of the régime, they did nothing to present the fighters on the ground with the facts. The advancing Americans of 1-64, moving at high speed down boulevards leading to the city centre, found fighters eating breakfast, evidently oblivious of imminent danger. Farther down the street other fighters, alerted by the sound of approaching gunfire, hastily manned defensive positions. They drenched the American armoured columns with fire from their Kalashnikov assault rifles and RPG-7 grenade launchers, all of it ineffective against the armoured skins of Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles. The deeper the Americans penetrated, the more intense became the martyr impulse. Fighters appeared in hundreds along the sides of the streets into the city, mounting suicidal assaults with weapons instantly overpowered by those of the invaders.
The Americans on the ground were supported by Americans in the air, flying A-10 Warthog anti-tank aircraft. American gunship helicopters also added to the carnage, attacking Iraqi military positions and vehicles identified in the city streets. The fighting was not altogether one-sided. An Abrams tank was set on fire by a hit from an RPG-7 launcher but the crew were able to evacuate the vehicle without loss. Many of the armoured vehicles of 1-64 had been hit by anti-armour weapons, mostly RPG-7s, but none had been disabled. After repair and re-supply, 1-64 was ready for the next phase of operations. It had suffered no human casualties at all. By contrast hundreds of Iraqi fighters had been killed in the street combat.
There had also been heavy fighting during 5 April, persisting into 6 April, on Route 1, the highway leading out of Baghdad to Tikrit, Saddam’s seat of family and tribal power. It ran due north out of the city through a series of concrete intersections and, as the American pincers closed round Baghdad from west and east, it became the only remaining escape route out of the city to what might still be a place of refuge. The 3rd Brigade Combat Team of 3rd Infantry Division was ordered to take and hold it, against at first small parties of escapees but later a flood of motorized fugitives protected by tanks of the Republican Guard. The fight to prevent their leaving lasted for ten hours and was heavily contested, eventually resolving into an armoured battle between Republican Guard tanks and the 7th Cavalry for control of the last bridge the road crossed out of the city. Eight tanks were destroyed before the Americans closed off the exit.
General Blount’s soldiers now controlled the western perimeter of the capital, as the Marines did the eastern. The Iraqis lacked the means to break the cordon from the outside and, though there were still considerable numbers of soldiers and fighters within the city, Blount had concluded that they lacked the spirit or organization to conduct an effective defence. He decided on a second ‘thunder run’, to be mounted by his 2nd Brigade Combat Team, led by Colonel David Perkins. If it made a successful penetration the raid would become a permanent occupation of the city centre. Perkins, who proposed the raid, was convinced that occupation was now possible, since he sensed from the tempo of the fighting that the defenders were on the point of collapse. Generals McKiernan and Franks, conferring with the divisions and brigade commanders via their sophisticated communications system – which allowed the high command to call up images of the battleground on their television screens in ‘real time’ – concurred.
Soon after 2nd Brigade Combat Team left its line of departure, however, the fighting took an unpleasant turn. The key points on the way towards the centre, particularly the ‘régime district’ of ministries and palaces the Marines were attacking from the other direction, proved to be three concrete overpasses on the network of internal city streets, codenamed by the Americans Curly, Larry and Moe. On the advance towards them, an Iraqi surface-to-surface missile, one of the few fired during the campaign since the fighting on the Fao peninsula at the outset, impacted near Perkins’s headquarters, killing five soldiers and damaging several vehicles. The missile strike caused disorganization and brief delay. Soon after it, however, 2nd BCT had resumed the advance, led by 1st Battalion 64th Armored Regiment, with seventy Abrams tanks and sixty Bradley armoured fighting vehicles. The enemy they encountered were mainly fedayeen, now somewhat better organized since the first ‘thunder run’ of 5 April. Obstacles had been improvised by overturning buses, trucks and construction vehicles, and strongpoints and barricades had been constructed along and across the streets. The obstacles were pushed aside by the tanks, acting as bulldozers. Colonel Perkins then judged the way into central Baghdad to be open and ordered 1-64 and its sister unit, 4-64, to press ahead. The régime district of ministries and palaces was an hour away. The district in between, formed of parks and wide avenues, offered good fields of fire and could easily be defended against fedayeenhuman-wave attacks. Blount approved Perkins’s plan on condition that his lead elements could be re-supplied with fuel and ammunition.
The fight for central Baghdad, launched up Highway 8 towards the Moe, Curly and Larry overpasses, became during 7 April essentially one of passing the resupply columns forward to the fighting troops. Responsibility for the operation moved to another battalion of 3rd Infantry Division, 3rd Battalion 15th Infantry Regiment (3-15), commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Steven Twitty. Twitty’s rapid assessment was that to guarantee the arrival of resupply at the engaged units he would have to secure and hold the three overpasses, Moe, Larry and Curly, the first a mile apart, Curly two miles farther on. Twitty committed his conventional infantry, mounted in Bradleys and protected by Abrams tanks, to Moe and Larry. Curly he had to consign to the battalion’s support units, which had some Bradleys but were largely equipped with obsolete M-113 armoured personnel carriers or with armoured engineer vehicles. The men of these units, trained for but not normally assigned to the infantry role, were suddenly to find themselves in the front line. Fortunately their commander, Captain Zan Hornbuckle, was much respected in the battalion as a leader and under his command 3-15 was successfully to defend all its strongpoints. Hornbuckle deployed his vehicles in cordons around Moe, Curly and Larry, which were encircled by entrenched Iraqi positions. As soon as the soldiers of 3-15 appeared, the Iraqi defenders began to attack, charging in successive waves on foot and in vehicles they had appropriated, taxis, cars and pickup trucks mounting machineguns, the ubiquitous ‘technicals’ of Muslim fighters all over the Middle East and Africa. In the aftermath of the battle for the overpasses, it became apparent that many of the enemy were not Iraqi but Syrians, who had crossed the border to fight the Americans in prosecution of the war against the Great Satan. They used mortars, could call on artillery but preferred, as almost all fighters in Iraq did throughout the campaign, to rely on RPG-7 rocket launchers, firing their projectiles in salvoes at close range. In response every unwounded American, and even some of the wounded, turned their weapons against the enemy.
The fighting was hottest at strongpoint Curly where Hornbuckle’s Sergeant-Major, Robert Gallagher, who had been wounded in the debacle in Mogadishu in 1993, convinced his senior officer that it was essential to demand reinforcements. B Company of 3-15 was alerted at short order and raced northwards to the relief, armoured vehicles intermixed with resupply trucks, with all soldiers, combat specialists or not, firing their weapons as they advanced. When B Company, 3-15, arrived at strongpoint Curly, five of the resupply vehicles, loaded with ammunition and fuel, were sent up in flames by fedayeen fire but the other fifteen survived and the American garrison of the position sustained the defence.
At strongpoints Moe and Larry the fight had meanwhile been going on for six hours. The American defenders were attacked by a car bomb driven by a suicide bomber at Larry but obstacles improvised by combat engineers arrested its impetus before it reached its target point. Car and bomber were destroyed by the detonation. At Moe combat engineers improvised other obstacles to block suicide bombers, while the commander on the spot organized counter-attacks to engage columns of Iraqi fighters set on attacking the position. Sixty Iraqi vehicles were destroyed and hundreds offedayeen killed. All American forces in the city centre, despite 3-15’s delivery of fuel and ammunition, were now short of supplies. A reorganization of supply with the vehicles that had reached the focus of the fighting was hastily arranged and reinforcements from another battalion of the 3rd Infantry Division, 2nd Battalion 7th Infantry Regiment (2-7) were hurried forward to support 3-15. Strongpoint Moe was swiftly resupplied. Then 3-15 proceeded at high speed into central Baghdad. During the night of 7–8 April the centre and the régime district, already partly under the control of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, was completely secured.
The Marines had meanwhile closed up to the Tigris and its tributary, the Diyala river, on the south-east corner of the capital. In the right angle formed by the confluence of the Tigris and the Diyala stood a sprawl of poor housing, known as Saddam City, and a prison, military offices and the Rashid military air base. On the other side of Saddam City the roads led to the régime district, contained within one of the wide meanders of the Tigris. The three marine regimental combat teams, with their attached tank and armoured reconnaissance battalions and supporting artillery, were now deployed very close to the heart of the capital, in line with RCT 7 on the left, RCT 1 in the centre and RCT 5 on the right, across a front of about six miles. Between them and their objectives, however, lay the Diyala, which had steep banks offering few crossing points. There were two bridges in RCT 7’s area but for once the Iraqi engineers had done their work. A narrow pedestrian bridge had a ten-foot gap in the centre, the four-lane concrete Baghdad Bridge had lost fifty feet of its centre span. The marine engineers reckoned that the gap in the pedestrian bridge could be repaired by pushing planks across, making it usable by infantry, but the concrete bridge would require major work. The bridging train would have to bring up and emplace metal spans to make it possible for tanks to be passed across.
Once over, the plan was for the Marines to push ahead in strength into the city and hold the ground taken. Unlike the army units of 3rd Infantry Division they did not intend to mount probing raids but to fight and take territory. The different plans reflected different organizations. Despite its title, 3rd Infantry Division had a heavy complement of armour of several types but relatively few foot soldiers. The marine regimental combat teams, by contrast, were largely infantry units. Traditionally the US Marine Corps has been and remains an infantry force and its battalions are trained and expect to fight on foot. Once across the river, they would fight their way down the city streets to secure the centre. The problem was to get over the Diyala, which was defended on the far bank by Iraqi entrenchments.
The initial crossing was made over the pedestrian bridge. Ferreting about in the debris that littered the area, the Marines of K Company, 3rd Battalion 7th Marines had found the necessary planks and also a metal gate. Shouldering the bridging material and formed in single file, they charged onto the broken bridge towards the far bank, thirty yards away. Iraqi artillery was firing – the artillery commander was heard on radio intercept attempting to correct his battery’s fire – and one shell killed or wounded four Marines just behind the point of assault. The assault team, however, reached the gap in the bridge, dropped the metal gate across it, threw the planks on top and charged on to gain the far bank. There was a little firing but it was ineffective. Almost all the defenders had fled and their entrenchments, when overrun, were revealed to be wrongly sited. Instead of having been dug behind the lip of the river bank, they were on the forward, exposed side and so useless.
The Marines who had crossed the pedestrian bridge at once fanned out to search the houses on the city side, breaking down doors, surveying the interior and shouting ‘clear’ as they raced from one to another. (Elsewhere in the city the Americans took paint canisters with them, to spray ‘C’ on buildings which had been found empty of enemy or obvious booby traps.) Journalists and photographers jogged along with the fire teams; this was a media war and the crossing of the Diyala one of its reportorial high points. Beyond the houses on the river bank stood a grove of palm trees, which threatened danger. It proved to be full of abandoned military equipment but the enemy had fled. Five hundred yards beyond the bridge the Marines paused to form a perimeter. A defensible bridgehead had been secured and the follow-up units could cross in safety. Still, however, danger threatened. First one and then another vehicle approached the marine positions down roads leading to the river and were engaged with machine-gun fire. Both were stopped, neither proved to be a military vehicle, several civilians were killed. The marine officers cursed. Such incidents had proliferated throughout the campaign. Civilian vehicles had time and again driven at high speed into firefights, as if their occupants were oblivious to the dangers of war all about them. It was pointless to order young Marines to hold their fire. Too many apparently disoriented civilian drivers had proved to be armed fedayeen or suicide bombers, bent on destruction. Yet some who were shot up as they careered into American roadblocks clearly were disoriented or in denial. One of the most bewildering characteristics of this strange war was the apparent refusal of civilians to accept that a war was indeed going on. They drove about, in vehicles easily mistaken for the ‘technicals’ used by fighters, as if the Americans should understand that they were on a family outing or their way to market, as they often were. The result was the spectacle of dead fathers or slaughtered children in bullet-riddled cars skewed across the roadway; incensed American soldiers, stricken with guilt at what they had done, took refuge in feigned indifference: ‘Why didn’t they stop? How can we tell? I’ve got a family too.’
The seizure of the pedestrian bridgehead simplified the crossing problem. While marine engineers worked to mend the break in the concrete Baghdad Bridge into Saddam City, another battalion had regained the bridge farther north and pontoon bridges were being laid in other places. The three marine brigades were now jostling for position to lead the charge into central Baghdad. An argument was also in process between commanders about whether to raid or to mount push-and-hold penetration operations. As intelligence accumulated, it was becoming clear that eastern Baghdad was a ‘target rich’ objective. Beside the Rasheed military airport, there was also the Saddam Fedayeen training centre, the Atomic Energy Commission, Baghdad University campus, the Directorate of General Security Headquarters, the Ministry of Defence, Fedayeen headquarters and one of Saddam’s palaces, the Al Azamiya. Eastern Baghdad was divided by marine staff officers into three regimental zones, while the regiments subdivided zones into battalion sectors, nine altogether. The battalion sectors were farther subdivided into six. Once one sector was secured, the troops were to move on to the next.
The advance of 1st Marine Expeditionary Force into eastern Baghdad during 7–8 April was not heavily opposed. Such resistance as the Marines encountered was disorganized. The abandoned Atomic Energy Commission was secured without meeting resistance. The advance into the university area on 9 April was more strongly opposed; stay-behind fedayeen made a stand in the middle of the campus, firing RPG-7s or Kalashnikovs at the advancing marines. There was, however, no real defence. Of the regular army and the Republican Guard there was no sign. The night of 8–9 April was disturbed by sporadic, ineffective firing. On 9 April, with the university campus taken, the Marines pressed on and soon reached Firdos (Paradise) Square, dominated by one of the many statues of Saddam Hussein found by the invaders throughout Iraqi cities. Iraqi opponents of the régime had already attempted to pull the statue down by throwing a loop around its neck and using muscle power. A marine armoured engineer vehicle now amplified their efforts. Its cable loop broke the statue’s supports and Saddam’s image collapsed face-forward revealing a shoddy framework of metal struts that had held it upright.
The fall of the Saddam statue on 9 April, televised across the world, was taken by its media to mark the fall of the Saddam régime. Yet despite the cinematic sensation of the event, many in the media resisted the impulse to exult. As representatives of the bien pensants in Europe and even parts of North America, many television and print journalists declined to celebrate the fall of the dictator the toppling of his statue symbolized. Monster though he clearly was, his humiliation at the hands of the capitalist system – the United States, the world’s largest economy, Britain, the fourth – rankled. In Saddam’s own world, many followed the media lead. Iraqis who had suffered under his selfish autocracy rejoiced. The beneficiaries were downcast, as was ‘the Arab street’ in general. A Jordanian refugee from Palestine told a BBC correspondent in Amman, ‘It’s just too painful. We Arabs were once a great nation. We were in Spain for 700 years. And where are we now? We’re beaten in our own homes.’
To most Europeans and Americans for whom the Arab kingdom of Spain and the Muslim domination of the Balkans, if remembered at all, are footnotes of history, Muslim fellow-feeling for Saddam is inexplicable. They genuinely regard him as a would be accomplice of Hitler and Stalin who, like them, terrorized his own people and wished to mount a campaign of conquest and revenge against the liberal democracies of the West. Confident in the benevolence of their own societies, to which the Third World apparently wishes to migrate en masse, Europeans and Americans fail altogether to understand the hatred felt by the world’s outsiders, particularly fundamentalist Muslims, for their way of life. It is possible for Westerners intellectually to grasp the essentials of Muslim belief, that religious teaching should predominate in public affairs, that women should be modest in manner and dress and outwardly subordinate to men, that the premodern texts of the Koran and Sharia law should be accorded the respect due to literal truth; but they do not regard such beliefs as applying outside what they regard as the closed borders of the Muslim world. They are particularly resistant to the view that Muslim secularists, such as Saddam, should enjoy the liberty to organize a Muslim society as they choose while simultaneously invoking an Islamic right – the basis of the Ba’athist idea – to a special place in regional and ultimately world affairs. Saddam, as dictator of Iraq, was that most dangerous of individuals, a Muslim who could dodge between religious and secularist appeals to authority, personally loyal to neither creed, adept at exploiting the power of both over the minds of his followers.
The fall of Saddam’s statue on 9 April was swiftly followed by the occupation of the premises from which he and his intimates had exercised their dictatorial regime. The ‘palace’ so-called of Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s Deputy Prime Minister, was quickly taken. The occupation of the five ‘palaces’ – large, vulgar, recently built villas – allotted to Saddam’s inner family swiftly followed. Not without loss; though a hundred fedayeen were killed in the fight for the palaces, twenty-two Marines were wounded, in exchanges of fire with assault rifles and rocket launchers. The capture of Baghdad had been in many respects a model of a modern military operation, cunningly planned with every electronic aid, skilfully executed by highly trained troops. Even the best battles, however, have their price for the victors. The cost had been paid by the soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division and the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.