Saddam Eyes Endgame, Gathers in His Elite Forces
DEBKAfile Special Analysis for Day 12 of Iraq War – March 31
March 31, 2003, 3:47 PM (GMT+02:00)
The Iraq war is resolving itself into a battle of wits whose lines are deliberately blurred by the bravado, ambiguous maneuvers and half-truths propagated by both sides. The protagonists are US General Tommy Franks and Saddam Hussein. The score on Day 12 of the war is even. DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources and military analysts stress that both are perfectly aware that the war will end in an American battlefield victory. With an eye on the endgame, the two are maneuvering over its cost. DEBKA Special Map shows positions north of Baghdad .
Franks’ goal is a victory with the lowest number of American casualties, whereas Saddam, who has no inhibitions about the human cost to his army and people, seeks to extract from the conflict enough leverage to dictate the conditions for his and his sons’ survival.
Franks commands US military preponderance.
Saddam owns the chemical, biological and nuclear weaponry for making his defeat a black day of double-digit American war casualties and deadly fallout for Iraq’s neighbors, Jordan, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
This standoff decided General Franks on Day 12 of the war to decelerate the lightning movement of coalition columns towards Baghdad in favor of cautious progress, even at the price of creating the impression of a calculated pause in the advance.
Saddam, in contrast, after thrusting units of his Special Republican Guards into frontal clashes with the spearheads of the advancing American columns – while also resorting to suicide-killer and other terrorist tactics - suddenly on March 31 pulled his forces back to the Baghdad region.
That same afternoon, according to DEBKAfile’s military and intelligence sources, orders went out to the Baghdad Division of the Special Republican Guards, fighting on the southern reaches of the Tigris in central Iraq, to turn round and redeploy on a line north of al Kut – without however destroying the river bridges.
What is intended by this step is not clear. It may be meant to lure American forces into crossing the bridges and entering al Kut, where they will face an onslaught like the one they encountered at Nasiriya last week. That may be the moment for Iraq to let loose against the trapped American troops with weapons of mass destruction.
Another two Special Republican Guards Divisions, Adnan and Nebuchadnezzar, formerly posted in the northern and western regions, were drawn south. Adnan is retreating from Baiji towards Tikrit; Nebuchadnezzar, from western Iraq towards Falluja – both just north of Baghdad. The 2nd Armed Division of the 1st Corps has withdrawn from Kirkuk to a southern line that keeps the oil city and its oil fields well within artillery range. The Iraqi 5th Corps also appeared Sunday to be preparing to abandon the second northern oil city of Mosul.
These movements tighten the ring thrown by Saddam’s elite and most loyal combat troops around his regime centers at Baghdad and Tikrit.
They confront Franks with three choices:
1. To order the American columns to dog the steps of the retreating Iraqi divisions.
2. To wait and see how far back the Iraqi forces move into the Baghdad region, the while keeping up heavy round-the-clock air attacks on the capital.
3. To deploy the “Screaming Eagles” of the 101st Airborne Division for surprise sorties against Iraqi formations.
On another front, the Sunni Saddam is striving to enlist a powerful weapon, the rival Shiah, Iraq’s largest population segment.
DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources report that, Sunday, March 30, Iran’s spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei directed Iraqi Shiites not to rise up against Saddam Hussein or help the US-UK coalition topple his regime. The order was conveyed through their leaders – the Tehran-based SCIRI (Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq) and the Dawa Party. The Tehran government’s calculus was simple: The Shiites can afford to stand aside while the Iraqis and Americans spill each other’s blood. The Shiites will gather the spoils whoever comes out on top.
Saddam, picking up fast on the Tehran-Shiite strategy, directed his spokesmen to start using Shiite terminology. The Iraqi officer who blew himself up to murder four American soldiers near Najef was posthumously renamed Al-Husayn Ben Ali after the son of the first Iraqi Shiite leader who lived in the Karbala region in the seventh century. This gesture was aimed at making the suicide bomber a martyr honored by the Shiites.
The battle two Iraqi elite divisions, the SRG’s Al Medina and Hamourabi, are waging west of Karbala with the US 3rd Infantry and 101st Airborne Divisions is being likened by Iraqi media to the celebrated battle of Karbala of October 10, 680, in which the family of Ali, descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, was butchered by the followers of the Sunni Omayyads. The Shiites lost the historic battle, but it sanctified Ali and his offspring as founding fathers of the Shia sect.
It is hard for the American psy-op machine to get a handle on these arcane yet tidal semantic currents or fit the coalition message into their powerful religious context. In the race for the hearts of the Shiites who make up more than half of Iraq’s population Saddam has the advantage of being able to manipulate these nuances, leaving coalition forces to address the Shiites in what sounds to them like an alien tongue.
The price for this unfamiliarity with shifting local mores was paid on Sunday, March 30, when British forces launched Operation James in the Basra region and failed to make headway after finding themselves let down by the predominantly Shiite citizenry. For Basra’s Shiites, the Imam Ali is clearly a far more potent icon than 007.
March 30 saw additional pivotal developments in the war.
1. The coalition’s victory at the “huge terrorist facility” in northern Iraq was understandably played up by Gen. Franks and General Richard Myers, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. Truth to tell, the battle was pretty well decided in advance when, on Friday, March 28, Jamat al-Islamiyeh, one of the two Islamic terror groups ruling the extremist Kurdish enclave north of Halabje, announced its dispersal. The second group, Ansar al Islami, known for its links to al Qaeda and Iraqi military intelligence, was previously decimated by systematic US cruise missile bombardments.
Jalal Talabani’s Kurdish militia therefore met with little resistance when its fighters went into Ansar villages. They quickly finished off the remnants. The last few survivors fled across the border to Iran.
2. Notwithstanding the redeployment of Iraqi forces outside the northern oil city of Kirkuk, the Kurds are for the moment keeping their promise to the Americans to stay out of the city and its oil fields. The Erdogan government has threatened a Turkish invasion of northern Iraq if any Kurds set foot in Kirkuk, even at the risk of a bloody clash with Kurdish fighters.
3. Syrian President Bashar Assad is toying with brinkmanship and may go too far. After the hands-off warning from US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld failed to take effect, secretary of state Colin Powell weighed in Sunday, March 30, to inform Damascus that it will be responsible for its “choices and consequences”. This warning was issued after the Palestinian Jihad Islami Damascus-based leader, Shalah Ramadan, called on the Iraqi ambassador and announced that his organization had sent from the Syrian capital to Baghdad a brigade of suicide fighters.
Syria is therefore not only providing Saddam Hussein with his only corridor for importing war materials but also fighting strength. The moment is therefore nearing for Washington to take action against Syria and Lebanon. Since the Jihad Islami is dominated and funded by Tehran, Iran may also find itself in American sights at some stage of the war.
4. Prime minister Ariel Sharon continues to keep Israelis in the dark and confused about the war in Iraq and its implications for the country. Sunday, he ordered officials and officers to stop voicing opinions on the subject. Foreign minister Silvan Shalom, before he left for Washington, was told to refrain from touching on the war or the “road map” in his talks with US officials. It is hard therefore to see what the point of those talks would be. Because of this prime ministerial ban, some minister have begun leaking fragments from the briefings they receive at closed cabinet sessions – usually out of context - which leaves the public more at sea and misinformed than ever.
Uday’s 800,000-Strong Guerrilla-Suicide Army
From DEBKA-Net-Weekly 103 updated by DEBKAfile
March 31, 2003, 3:19 PM (GMT+02:00)
Uday Hussein, faithfully obeying his father, immersed himself from April 2002 in creating a vast guerrilla-terrorist army 800,000 strong, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s intelligence sources. Its largest component, around 650,000, comes from the ubiquitous Baath party, the Saddam regime’s eyes, ears and informers in every corner of Iraqi society, together with members of Saddam’s Fedayeen (Martyrs) Division of the Special Republican Guards.
These Iraqi elements – irregular and military – were responsible for plaguing the American columns pushing north to Baghdad and playing havoc with their long supply lines, forcing the allied war command to take stock of the pace of advance on Baghdad.
From Thursday, March 27, allied air forces, while keeping the bombing momentum up in Baghdad, Basra and against concentrations of Republic Guards, began hitting back by pipointing pinpointed Baath centers. In two days, they attacked nine headquarters.
The regime’s Baath loyalists were easily recruited. On top of his regular paycheck, each was given a $200 monthly bonus for attending military training three times a week and a further $50 for any relative over 14 brought in. The training included dare-devil driving tactics behind the wheels of pickup trucks, usually Nissens, while firing heavy machineguns or light mortars, planting and detonating explosives, mounting ambushes and taking part in coordinated sorties by groups of armed vehicles.
Their most effective weapon was one unanticipated by US tank troops: a Russian-made Kornet AT-14 ATGM laser wire-guided anti-tank missile capable of penetrating 1100 to 1200 millimeters of steel armor protected by explosive armor at a distance of 3.5 km. This formidable direct-fire weapon is fitted on the fast-moving Nissen trucks driven by the guerrillas. The Kornet’s drawbacks are that, to keep its sights locked on target, it must remain stationary after firing; moreover, its wire-guided missiles cannot be fired over trees, power lines or water, because the wire will snag and break disabling the guidance system. The Kornet will therefore lose effectiveness as US tanks approach the canals and power lines around Baghdad. However, in the open desert, the Kornet is helping Iraqi forces equalize the advantages of superior American weapons. It is credited with disabling a number of heavy American Abrahm-1 tanks and one Bradley armored troop carrier of the US 3d Division fighting in the central region around Nasiriya.
The missile and instructors for its use, DEBKAfile intelligence sources report, were provided by an old friend of Saddam Hussein, President Aleksander Lukashenko of Belarus. It was sent to over through Iraq’s primary smuggling route across Syria. The CIA is investigating reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin may have given the nod to the delivery.
The Baath party hacks were transformed into guerrilla fighters by an estimated 700 Iraqi military intelligence officers who in the 1990s underwent long training stints in guerrilla and terror tactics in Chechnya with al Qaeda experts.
Uday is rumored to have made secret trips to Iran, Lebanon, Bosnia and Macedonia to bring 300 al Qaeda instructors over to Iraq. He also made a study of the deadliest terrorist practices incepted by al Qaeda and Taliban in Afghanistan and by Palestinian terrorists in their confrontation with Israel.
The pickup-terror tactic he picked up from Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda and Taliban plied dozens and sometimes hundreds of fast vehicles armed with light and heavy weapons as an instrument of repression against Afghan tribes and warlords. Fear of the “white devils” suddenly darting out at them kept tribal chiefs intimidated and obedient. Uday found them ideal for bedeviling US troops and their long supply lines in the open Iraqi desert as they came up from Kuwait and Qatar. At the end of 2002, he sent agents to Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia to buy 7,500 pickups with four-wheel drives, ostensibly for farms newly established to “make the desert bloom”.
Painting them in the drab colors of the desert, Iraqi mechanics fitted the vehicles with heavy machine guns, handing them to local Baath militia cells with orders to strike at US columns, waylay supply convoys and vehicles lost in the desert and terrorize US military camps bedded down for the night.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s intelligence sources add that, after borrowing al Qaeda’s raiding tactics, Uday took a leaf out of Yasser Arafat’s suicide terror strategy. They report that while US intelligence officers were taking notes of the large-scale battles Israel conducted in Palestinian towns from April to September 2002 – especially in Nablus and Jenin, Iraqi intelligence agents studied Palestinian combat tactics and sent in their reports to Uday by couriers passing through Jordan or Syria.
The Americans made a study of Israeli combat in the densely populated areas of Arab cities; Uday’s informants focused on the Palestinians’ failure to keep Israeli troops out of their Casbahs and the refugee camps of Nablus and Jenin, despite their honeycombs of narrow alleyways and interconnecting underground tunnels. He concluded that Israeli intelligence had been forewarned which of the alleys and buildings were booby-trapped and had kept Israel troops out of harm’s way. To be on the safe side, IDF soldiers initiated the method of passing from house to house by breaking through internal walls instead of exposing themselves to attack on the outside.
Saddam’s son also concluded that the Palestinians had not prepared a large enough force of suicide bombers to stop the Israelis from seizing their cities. Only in Jenin, in the battle fought on April 7, 2002, did a group of Palestinian and Hizballah suicide fighters blow themselves up and inflict heavy Israeli casualties.
After making a thorough study of these techniques, Uday ordered the 100,000 troops of Saddam’s Fedayeen commandos to set up small suicide units of 3-5 men in every Iraqi city including Baghdad and Tikrit. These men were ordered to greet US forces entering their towns by blowing themselves up in sequence and also picking off allied troops at vulnerably points.
Saturday, March 29, the first suicide bomber went into action, killing four US soldiers of the 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division by blowing up a taxi at a checkpoint on the Baghdad Highway 9 north of Najef.
Like the Palestinians, the Iraqis regard suicide terror as a legitimate military tactic for which military units are specifically trained, notably Saddam’s Fedayeen Division. The first Iraqi human bomb was a serviceman, NCO Al Jaafar al-Noamani, who was awarded two posthumous medals by Saddam Hussein. Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan went on TV to announce that “blessed martyrdom” was to be routine military policy.
