Agence France Presse March 13, 2003
The armies: Saddam's weakened army expected to defend Baghdad
After decimation in the last Gulf war and 12 years of economic sanctions, Iraq's military has withered, going from a one-million-strong fighting force that was once the fourth-biggest in the world, to a mainly rag-tag outfit half that size suffering low morale.
But military experts said there remained a well-trained core that could still prove deadly to US forces if, as expected, President Saddam Hussein deploys them in and around his strongholds: Baghdad and his northern hometown of Tikrit.
With no real air force nor navy left to speak of after Iraq's defeat in 1991, US commanders have turned their attention to the army.
That is estimated at around 400,000 strong, with 2,000 tanks, 3,700 other armoured vehicles and thousands of heavy weapons, including anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, according to figures from GlobalSecurity.org, a US military analysis firm. In comparison, the United States and Britain have assembled 250,000 troops for their planned invasion.
But up to three-quarters of the Iraqi army is believed to be in no state to fight, according to US and British media reports. Underfunded, underfed and reportedly ready to surrender in their thousands, the ordinary soldiers are largely dismissed in both Baghdad and Washington's war plans.
The remaining 100,000, members of the Republican Guards and the elite Special Republic Guards, on the other hand, pose a credible defence. Better paid, better trained and much better equipped, these divisions are seen as fiercely loyal to Saddam and ready to offer a strong riposte.
Having learned from his strategic failures in Gulf War I, when he severely underestimated the strength, technology and the resolve of the allied forces arrayed against his army, Saddam is widely expected to group his hard-core soldiers around Baghdad and Tikrit for a last stand.
The aim would be to lure the US and British soldiers into the urban centres, thus negating the US advantage of air supremacy and putting the invaders in unfamiliar settings crowded with civilians -- all of whom have been exhorted to make guerrilla strikes themselves.
Saddam's tactic would be to create a sort of Grozny or Mogadishu scenario, where US troops could be picked off and where they would hesitate to hit back, experts said.
Various military analysts "have warned of very heavy casualties from fighting through blocked and barricaded streets, under constant attack from snipers, dug-in tanks and plunging mortar bombs -- as well as the pervasive small arms fire of thousands of militia volunteers," said Edward Luttwak of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
But civilian resistance is unlikely to be effective, and Israel's now-regular armoured assaults against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip show that it could be done, he added in comment to Britain's The Sunday Times and the United States' Newsweek.
Before that point, though, most of the US-led forces will have to traverse more than 500 kilometres (300 miles) from the Kuwait border to the Iraqi capital -- a long journey along a road network that starts in the marshy south and goes through hot, dry desert.
The advance will sorely test US logistics, and the invaders will not be able to move any faster than their fuel and water supplies.
Saddam could also blow up dams across the Euphrates and Tigris rivers that run across his country, thus stalling US convoys at deep waters until military engineers build bridges.
But the biggest unknown factor, and the one that most unsettles the GIs and their commanders is Iraq's alleged stock of chemical and biological weapons. Will a cornered Saddam use them?
Thus far, the UN inspectors looking for such agents have found nothing, but US suspicions run strong that smallpox and anthrax offensives are possible, and the allied soldiers -- and many of the reporters accompanying them -- have been given vaccines.
Copyright © 2003, Agence France Presse
