Posted on 03/27/2003 1:49:05 PM PST by RJCogburn
WITH THE FIRST MARINE DIVISION, in Iraq, March 27 — Marine and other allied units pressing toward Baghdad are coming under nearly constant harassment and ambush by small bands of irregular Iraqi fighters and remnants of army units they bypassed in their rush, and officers fear the resistance will only stiffen as they get nearer the capital.
"We've been contested every inch, every mile on the way up," Col. Ben Saylor, the First Marine Division's chief of staff, said today.
Even as he spoke, a separate Marine unit, Task Force Tarawa, was in the fifth day of a pitched battle in Nasiriya, a city well behind their lines and more than 100 miles south of the First Marines' forward units.
Only hours later, Iraqi fighters spilled out of Samawah, a town a little north of Nasiriya, and fought United States Army troops in an effort to cut vital supply lines along Highway 8.
Asked if he thought the fighting would be more fierce as the allied forces neared the Iraqi Republican Guard divisions south of Baghdad, the colonel replied, "Yeah, I think it's going to be."
The attacks call into question the American strategy of sweeping past Iraqi Army positions and towns to try to reach Baghdad swiftly and, as officers here put it, "cut off the head" of the regime. The attacks also call into question the Americans' confident belief that they would be welcomed as liberators.
Instead, the Americans could find their long and vulnerable supply lines —convoys of thousands and thousands of trucks hauling food, fuel, water and ammunition stretching back into Kuwait — subject to attack and interdiction.
Delays could strengthen efforts by Saddam Hussein to turn a siege of Baghdad into political theater, portraying it to world opinion as a civilian crisis.
The planned assault on Baghdad is now about three days behind schedule, officers here say, but the delays were caused not by the ambushes but by the huge sandstorm that swept in for several days this week, disrupting the convoys — roughly 7,000 vehicles to move the division — blinding night-vision goggles and fouling equipment as diverse as pistols, helicopters and computers.
The critical thing, senior Marine officers say, is to maintain the sequence in which American troops under the Army's V Corps move forward simultaneously on the west, and British forces advance on the east, each protecting the flanks of the other.
Colonel Saylor and other intelligence and operations officers here at division headquarters characterized the attackers mainly as members of militias associated with Mr. Hussein and his sons, the Saddam Fedayeen and Al Quds Brigade, along with die-hard Baath Party supporters. The officers believe they may be getting rudimentary military direction from Republican Guard officers.
Their weapons are the light equipment common to guerrillas and armies throughout the third world: shoulder-fired rocket-propelled grenades, Soviet-era AK-47 assault rifles and some small mortars.
But while the Marines say they have easily cut down most of the attackers with overwhelming firepower, they have been impressed in many cases with their tenacity. In one widely recounted incident, a force of about 20 guerrillas charged a Marine armored patrol head on. Only about eight Iraqis survived the first devastating round of fire — but they got up and charged again.
"They're pretty gutsy, they're showing a lot of guts," said Capt. Dave Nettles, an intelligence officer with the Seventh Regimental Combat Team, whose light-armored reconnaissance patrols have had several scraps with the guerrillas. "Maybe they don't have anything to lose."
In a similar vein, Colonel Saylor added: "They come, they keep coming. They get up and they come."
"This isn't the varsity," he added. "Is this going to stop us? No, not on a bad day."
Colonel Saylor and other officers said that they had discovered arms caches along the route. Some of the guerrillas are traveling in Toyota pickup trucks. And most seemed to be operating in civilian clothes. The colonel added that in some of the towns, "it's the Baath Party headquarters — that's where they pour out of."
Lt. Col. Clarke Lethin, an operations officer, said that "there are battalions stationed throughout the country in order to intimidate," adding, "The Baath Party and those people are still in charge."
Indeed, one reason why the resistance is springing up in the south, behind the advancing American lines, may well be that large units of Baath Party loyalists may have been based there as enforcers, to keep the restive Shiite Muslim majority in line.
The Americans had expected the Shiite population to rise up in favor of the invasion, but this does not appear to have happened on any significant scale as yet. Another factor yet to be weighed is the long tradition of nationalist and anticolonialist sentiment here dating back at least to the British mandate after World War I.
In addition to the machine guns, rockets and automatic grenade-launchers, the Marines are able to call in airstrikes by Cobra helicopter gunships against the attackers.
"We come back with decisive force and take them down immediately," Colonel Saylor said.
Colin Powell slapped this negativity down when asked this question by Leslie Stahl. The Americans are so far ahead that the journalists are stamping their feet.
You're forgetting that these same Semper Fi Guys have taken and now control an airport in that town with a 12,000-foot runway that we can use as an airlift supply route - LESSENING the dependence on the long LAND supply route and giving imbecilic urinalists one less thing to ask stupid questions about.
Our guys just took that airfield and are holding it secure.
Michael
Is that what they do? Really? The Germans did the same thing invading Russia- bypassed and encircled large pockets of resistance. In fact- if Hitler hadn't become nervous about such pockets and diverted vital resources to the South- Moscow would have fallen and most likely the Soviet Union. Not one of our convoys has been destroyed or even seriously challenged and the times comes up with this crap. They wrote this story first and then trolled for quotes they could cut and splice to match their hope that this war fails! Disgusting. The military is doing the right thing. The Times can continue to write their fantasies - no one takes them seriouysly.
This effort by the liberal media to sabotage our war effort is the moral equivalent of treason, and it will become more obvious and more desperate as time goes on and our victory draws nearer.
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