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<p>BAGHDAD -- Iraq's armed forces virtually evaporated during the war in March and April because of a confused and often ineffectual command structure, which oversaw hundreds of thousands of disaffected soldiers who had no idea of the battle plan. After decades of dictatorship, the war was fought with little gusto by anyone other than Saddam Hussein's inner circle, former Iraqi officers say.</p>

ASHINGTONQuick — what was the biggest intelligence misjudgment of Gulf War II?It was the nearly unanimous opinion of the intelligence community, backed by the U.S. and British military, that the 50,000 elite soldiers of Saddam's well-trained, well-equipped Special Republican Guard would put up a fierce battle for Baghdad.Our military plan was based on this cautious assessment. That presumption of a bloody, last-ditch defense was also the basis for objections to the war: in street fighting, opponents argued, coalition casualties would be horrific, and tens of thousands of civilians would be sacrificed.Happily, our best assessment was mistaken. Saddam's supposed diehards...

<p>Baghdad -- In the final days before Baghdad fell, Saddam Hussein's son Qusai issued a series of military orders that sent thousands of elite Republican Guard troops to their certain death in the open countryside.</p> <p>According to accounts provided to The Chronicle by more than a dozen Iraqi military officials -- some of them still hiding from American forces -- the orders exposed the core of the Iraqi military to devastating U.S. air attacks and left the capital's defenses markedly weakened.</p>

The greatest danger we face from weapons of mass destruction, said former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, is that potential adversaries that acquire them -- such as North Korea or Iran -- will transfer them to terrorist organizations. Speaking this week to an audience gathered by the National Center for Policy Analysis, Eagleburger said it may be possible to deter states like North Korea and Iran from deploying weapons of mass destruction (chemical, biological or nuclear) but the covert transfer of technology or weapons to Al Qaeda and its ilk is more problematic. Since totalitarian countries with command economies like...

‘If my son is dead, I want to know for sure. I want to know that someone prayed over him when he was buried’ Daily Star staff Fawziah Khodr is still waiting for her son to return from Iraq. She has already been to Syria, where she spoke to dozens of “Arab volunteer” survivors who told her they haven’t seen him. Last week, she tried to cross the Syrian border into Iraq but couldn’t because she doesn’t have a passport and because the border was closed. She now has a passport ­ the cost of which she could hardly afford,...

<p>The Army's only retreat in the lightning-fast war to oust Saddam Hussein came after an Iraqi general in the town of Najaf cell-phoned ahead to his troops that a regiment of Apache attack helicopters was on the way.</p> <p>"He used it to speed-dial a number of Iraqi defenders," Lt. Gen. William Wallace, the commander of Army V Corps in Iraq, told reporters at the Pentagon yesterday via a teleconference hookup from Baghdad. "As our attack aviation approached the attack positions, they came under intense enemy fire."</p>

DAMASCUS, SYRIA – Paralyzed from the waist down after being shot by American soldiers in the battle for Baghdad, Fahd lies in a hospital bed here contemplating a bleak future. But any bitterness harbored by the 18-year-old Syrian student is reserved solely for the Iraqi Republican Guards, "traitors," he says, who yielded the Iraqi capital without a fight. All across the Arab world, young men who rallied to defend Iraq from the Anglo-American invasion are returning home, many of them disillusioned and embittered by the swift collapse of Iraqi resistance and the sometimes hostile reception they received from ordinary Iraqis....

<p>BAGHDAD, Iraq -Iraqi military commanders, certain they could never counter overwhelming American air power, thought they could defeat the United States by making a bloody stand for Baghdad that would so sicken the American public that the United States would withdraw its troops and go home.</p>

BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro - An Iraqi envoy loyal to Saddam Hussein said Friday he believes the Iraqi leader was killed in the coalition bombing of Baghdad. "I know his character," Iraq (news - web sites)'s ambassador to Belgrade, Sami Sadoun, told The Associated Press in an interview. "The defense of Baghdad would not have collapsed so quickly if he was not dead." Sadoun, who headed the Iraqi Cabinet for 25 years, said he lost all contact with his superiors in Baghdad early this month after a U.S. warplane dropped four bunker-busting bombs near a restaurant where Saddam was believed to be...

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Apr 19, 2003 (Knight Ridder Washington Bureau - Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News via COMTEX) -- Iraqi military commanders, certain they could never counter overwhelming American air power, thought they could defeat the United States by making a bloody stand for Baghdad that would so sicken the American public that the United States would withdraw its troops and go home. So Iraqi field commanders were surprised April 8, as they were preparing to battle American incursions into the capital, when they were ordered to withdraw and return to their bases north of the city, according to an Iraqi major...

<p>April 17, 2003 -- TWO weeks before the war to liberate Iraq began, Syria's President Bashar Assad made a visit to Tehran for 12 hours of "dense talks" with Iran's ruling mullahs.</p> <p>The visit, Bashar's fifth in two years, underlined his growing dependence on Iran as a regional ally. (By comparison, Bashar's father, the late President Hafez Assad, visited Tehran just once in his 30-year rule, and then only for six hours.) At the visit's end, officials on both sides spoke of the "strategic partnership" between the Syrian Ba'athist regime and the Khomeinist ruling clique in Tehran.</p>

We knew Saddam was mad, says officer in elite Guards By Kim Sengupta in Baghdad 17 April 2003 When his troops came to see Colonel A T Saied and protest that they did not want to die fighting in a hopelessly unequal war, he sent them home with his blessing. He and a group of other Republican Guard commanders had already decided that they were not going to sacrifice themselves or their men for Saddam Hussein. The colonel is the first senior officer of the Guards, the elite troops President Saddam depended on most, to talk about the fall of...

Demoralised soldiers from Iraq's Republican Guard thought Saddam Hussein was "mad" and deserted en masse before the first American tanks rolled into Baghdad, according to a colonel in the supposedly elite force. Speaking in the shabby family quarters given to Republican Guard officers in Baghdad, Col A T Said explained how the units that Saddam relied on most never had any intention of fighting for his regime. In the event, American forces were able to enter the capital with relative ease last week. They confounded predictions of prolonged, costly fighting. Saddam entrusted the Republican Guard's six divisions with the most...

After three weeks of intense fighting, the American military offensive against Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq more or less ended last Saturday. The military operation can be compared to smashing down pieces on a chess board by a violent hand and rearranging them according to a new guiding logic. The manner in which the pieces of the Iraqi regime were smashed down and are now being rearranged will serve as a basis for the work of politicians and an inspiration for military planners for years to come. I was privileged to bear witness to large swathes of the chess pieces...

Al-Nidaa, the Web site of the Al-Qa'ida organization, posted an initial reaction to the fall of Baghdad. The Al-Nidaa Web site, which is regularly knocked off the Web and thus its URL changes every few days,[1] is posting a series of articles on "The Crusader War in Iraq." The first article asks 35 questions, and the answers are published in the successive segments, at the rate of one every few days. The seventh segment, dated April 9, 2003, was written after the American forces entered Baghdad and following the disappearance of the leaders of the Iraqi regime. It claimed that...

Iraqi officer reveals army chaos The Republican Guard did not offer as much resistance as anticipated A colonel in Iraq's Republican Guard says he received few orders from the country's leaders during the war. Speaking from his home in a prosperous area of Baghdad, he told the BBC's Andrew Gilligan that the coalition bombardment of Iraq badly affected troop morale, with soldiers wanting to desert every day. In one of the first insights into how the elite Republican Guard has acted during the war, he said Iraq's military leaders only agreed to fight the war in the first place because,...

Recruits for jihad came from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and YemenPRESIDENT Saddam Hussein imported hundreds of well-trained Islamic guerrillas before the war to spearhead his fight against American and British forces, The Times has learnt. Documents and captives seized by British troops in Basra reveal that the recruits were arriving in Baghdad from Muslim countries including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Yemen as little as ten days before the war began. They came to wage jihad against the Western military, and provided some of the fiercest resistance as the coalition advanced northwards. Survivors are still mounting occasional attacks in Baghdad and other...

IT was a phenomenon of Arab brotherhood: from across the Middle East and even farther afield, hundreds of young men made their way to Iraq to fight the US and British "invaders". But with the fall of Baghdad and the disappearance of the Iraqi leadership, some volunteers are returning home, disillusioned and angry at the failure of their Jihad, or holy war. "We volunteered to defend Baghdad," said Firas Ali Abdullah, who returned to Syria with seven other Syrians and Lebanese yesterday. "Instead of giving us weapons to fight, they used us as human shields." Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Arabs...

Dictator's Collusion In The Iraq 'War' By Parviz Esmaeili The Tehran Times 4-9-3 Note - This is the first story to point in the direction of possible/probable answers to a number of key questions about the US-UK zionist subjugation of Iraq. When the Iraqis failed to blow a single bridge - a classic and mandatory defensive military strategy - suspicions arose immediately. Aside from a handful of oil well-head fires in the South, there was no effort to torch Iraq's oil assets by Saddam. The repeated deployment of the regular Iraqi army and the Guard into exposed areas in the...

Report of John Loftus WABC radio Batchelor Alexander Program 'Retired' Russian generals Atelov and Matsov have been in charge of Iraqi command and control. That is why no communications from Iraqi command and control have been intercepted since the start of the war. The Russians have been directing everything. The Russian convoy headed for Syria with the Russian ambassador was shot up (30 minute gunfight) because the secret communications equipment was being taken out. This equipment uses encryption that connects with the Russian equivalent of NSA. When asked whether US forces seized any equipment John Loftus said: "No comment". With...