Posted on 03/22/2003 6:21:10 PM PST by Pokey78
Iraq's inhospitable western desert is the scene of a campaign without the presence of cameras or media pools. The battle here is astride the crucial road from Jordan to Baghdad
The western desert is a flat land of compacted sand, sharp flints and pavements of limestone and basalt. Its occupants are a few Bedouin encampments and the occasional dirty towns that grew up around the pump stations on the now abandoned Baghdad-Haifa oil pipeline.
Now a road follows that pipeline, the main strategic route connecting Baghdad with Jordan to the west. And along this road a very different kind of war is being fought.
Last night these vast inhospitable plains, scoured by the wind and freezing at night, were the scene of the most secretive and least publicised fronts in the battle for Iraq: the war between small groups of US, UK and Australian Special Forces and the Iraqi troops stationed in this desert.
It has been a vicious campaign, of quick assaults and long drives through the swirling dust, punctuated by sharp firefights and sudden missile strikes on vehicles by Allied aircraft observed from above by unmanned drones and spotter planes.
It is a battlefield without cameras or media pools from which - for now - all media have been excluded on the orders of the US military, the site of a cat-and-mouse hunt for mobile Scud launchers that can threaten Israel and Jordan, and a battle for Baghdad's western approaches.
This is the road that the British motored along in 1941 in their four-day advance on Baghdad. That was a motorised column. This time the war is being fought by tiny and highly mobile groups.
Last week, one of the units motored through the Jordanian border town of Ruweished, a sand-coloured Humvee car without number plates, its food boxes and spare petrol strapped to its back, its occupants fixed with slightly embarrassed grins.
It was a rare sighting. By and large these men have kept a low profile, protected behind the road blocks of the Jordanian army. The forces that are fighting here include two squadrons of the SAS, a detachment of Royal Marines from 45 Commando, a squadron of Australian SAS, and several thousand US Special Forces, including Delta Force and elements of the 82nd Airborne Division. The British have been supported by RAF Harrier Mark VIIs and carried into combat by British Chinooks.
Despite the landing of Allied troops on the Iraqi side of the western desert, Iraqi troops still control their side of the Jordanian border, an area lined with watch towers and listening posts.
Under the great white arches that mark the Iraqi border post at Treibel, the figures of the Iraqi special police and agents who control the border post are occasionally visible as tiny figures. Those cars that still cross the border into Iraq - few and far between - are checked by these guards before being waved across.
But few can doubt that, when this 10-day shift of men stuck in the desert comes to the end of its watch in five days, the regime that employs them will no longer exist.
It is a bureaucratic fantasy of business as usual, as the guards collect their bribes to turn a blind eye to prohibited items of luggage and then try to flee. But they can see the US F-16s cut across the blue skies en route for targets 40 miles to the east at the town and airbase of H3, captured at the end of last week. They can hear, too, the C-130 carriers that fly at night across these borders and the clatter of the helicopters that disappear at dusk over the border with their cargoes of Special Forces troops.
Sources told The Observer yesterday that fighting in areas around the Baghdad highway had been at times intense. As of Friday, Pentagon officials admitted that control of the road remained 'tentative' at best.
The first target of the Special Forces war was H3, which lies 45 miles inside the border with Jordan. The second was another airfield, 65 further east across the desert, named H2.
According to sources familiar with the British side of the operation, British Special Forces, numbering just under 200, were flown into their designated targets by RAF Chinooks under the cover of darkness on Thursday night, an attack accompanied by loud explosions heard near the border.
The attack from within Jordan, which at the outbreak of war was regarded as one of the most politically sensitive fronts in the campaign, is regarded by military planners as crucial to the effort. President George Bush had secured the promise of Israel's Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, to keep out of the war and lay off his campaign against Gaza, in exchange for an aggressive effort to neutralise any mobile Scud missile batteries operating in the western desert, batteries that in the last war managed to hit targets in Tel Aviv and elsewhere in Israel.
The road is critical, as US civilian planners believe around 60 per cent of postwar humanitarian aid will be brought in from Jordan along this highway.
And there is a third, crucial reason for controlling this road, to screen it for the flight of senior members of the Baath regime towards the Jordanian border.
The capture of the airfield at H3 is also important, not because its radar batteries threaten US and UK aircraft attacking from over the Jordanian border but because it is a crucial jumping-off pad for helicopter-borne forces leapfrogging along the Baghdad highway.
And so last week the airfield came under heavy attack from supersonic B-1 bombers, which softened it up for the US-led attack.
The use of Jordanian soil is potentially embarrassing for the Jordanian government, which has insisted time and again that it would not be a launch pad for an attack against Iraq, and has only conceded that US forces were in the country to man anti-missile Patriot batteries, a claim that wears thinner by the day, as even Iraq has charged Jordan with hosting attacking forces.
As it should be. Who wants to see a replay of the Navy SEALS hitting the beach in Somalia in the dead of night with high intensity camera lights shining down on them and cameras rolling?
Let's just say that CENTCOM has the ability to monitor vehicles in that area, and leave it at that. Those vehicles could be taken out a number of ways.
Whether or not there is activity further North of H2 and H3 would depend on how much has come into these airbases and how secure they really are.
In this area, (H2 and H3 as well as further North) heliocopters such as Pave-Lows would be much more useful than Apaches. But if there were significant forces in place, then there would be Apaches and Blackhawks. AC-130 gunships could also be used in this area if resistance is met. Such things as M1A's and M2's would have to be flown in.
So it is just up to your imagination, and stories like Tom Clancy wrote to invision what might be going on.
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