Inside the Ring-Iraqi soldiers defecting

The Washington Times ^ | 28 February, 2003 | Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough

[Happy2BMe]

Morale is low in the Iraqi army and many soldiers are preparing white flags of surrender, we are told by someone in northern Iraq who recently interviewed two defectors from Saddam Hussein's army.

One was a captain who defected from the 5th Mechanized Division of the 1st Corps, based near the northern city of Kirkuk. The captain told our informant that the heavy division was only 35 percent combat-effective. The captain said morale was so low that younger soldiers are speaking openly about surrendering

[EGPWS]

Morale is low in the Iraqi army and many soldiers are preparing white flags of surrender, we are told by someone in northern Iraq who recently interviewed two defectors from Saddam Hussein's army.

I knew it all along that the reason the French are so against overthrowing Saddam that it would be found out that they were selling arms to Saddam.

[Cold Heat]

This may be the reason saddam has pulled them back closer to Bagdad. It did not make sense at first.

[Happy2BMe]

"The scariest damn part of the entire war was NOT seeing the B-2's approach"

Saddam and his two fool son's heads will be hangin' off sticks in downtown Ragdad by this time next month.

[dc-zoo]

I was going to say they could pull their underwear and use that for a surrender flag but it would likely be brown after the bombing starts.

[Cold Heat]

His perceived enemies were not invited, including us and Washington Post reporter Tom Ricks. Most of the other regular Pentagon scribes attended the soiree,

Not percived, but a fact.

[Happy2BMe]

"This may be the reason saddam has pulled them back closer to Bagdad. It did not make sense at first."

On a "pucker factor" scale of 1 - 10, Sandman and his boys is oh, somewhere around 18 (right about now).

[Happy2BMe]

"I was going to say they could pull their underwear and use that for a surrender flag but it would likely be brown after the bombing starts."

O.K. - you asked for it:

"After A Jihad Encounter With The Infidels"One of Saddam's Elite "Kuwaiti Scavenging" Guards

Another Victory For Saddam

Another Victory For Saddam

Baghdad - Next Right

Highway to Hell was when the Iraqi soldiers started to flee and were driving anything they could to get away. It was very brutal: over 1,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed on a two mile stretch of a highway.

"We flew over the Highway to Hell on the way out and from the air it was really spectacular," Olson says. "It's amazing to see the destruction that can be caused in such a short period of time."

After setting the oil wells on fire, the Iraqi soldiers fled Kuwait by the fastest means possible, the main highway back to Iraq. These soldiers took with them the goods they had looted from both private homes and businesses (appliances, TVs, VCR's, gold, cars anything of value). Their convoy was intercepted and the results of the firefight is shown above. Afterwards while checking for wounded, our soldiers found that every vehicle was packed with stolen goods from Kuwait.

[Arthur Wildfire! March]

No wonder France and Iraq get along so well!

[KickRightRudder]

Belly laugh at the quotes.

[upchuck]

His perceived enemies were not invited, including us and Washington Post reporter Tom Ricks. Most of the other regular Pentagon scribes attended the soiree

Ya reckon Helen Thomas made the "A" list?

[David Isaac]

Cogratulations to Gertz and Scarborough (for not being invited to Rummy's little tea party), for being inside without being "insiders".

Iraq's military readiness can be equated to that of the USSR, at any point following WWII. A land of empty scabbards, missiles without warheads (assuming there were any cabable of flying), morale in the cellar, and big, loud talk. Oh, and lest I forget, myriads of people in the West who are (were) overwrought by the threat posed by these dictatorial wienies.

[RayChuang88]

My personal guess is that we'll be using a lot less ammunition this time attacking Iraq. Knock out command and control infrastructure, capture Iraqi oilfield control centers (we've probably already done that thanks to Special Forces), and Saddam Hussein will be a goner within week since most of his military will have surrendered by then.

[chainsaw]

I wonder how many wil surrencer to Dan Rather?

[chainsaw]

A pair of white under shorts with brown spots will work just as well

[JSteff]

Good history but one change.
"They were summarily executed by firing squads for their crimes against humanity."
Firing squads are for military personnel, hanging is for common criminals.
So that should read.... >They were summarily hung for their crimes against humanity. Regrettably the knots where incorrectly tied and the distance of the drop was not sufficient to break their necks. They swung and kicked for almost thirty minutes before strangling to death.<
The U.S. has issued an apology to France saying "Maybe if our troops had not sat in the hot desert for two months waiting for the U.N. to enforce it's own mandates their knot tying and calculation skills might have been sharper."

[BlueLancer]

HIGHWAY OF DEATH ...

And here's PJ O'Rourke's take on this (from Give War A Chance)

Going back into the city at 6:00 AM, we could see that the Iraqis had left in a brainless panic. All their wrecked military equipment was pointed in the same, Baghdad-ward, direction. Allied air strikes had caused some of the destruction, but traffic accidents had caused more. Jeeps had smashed into tanks. Tanks had rammed bridge abutments. Armored personnel carriers had rear-ended ambulances. A truck towing a howitzer had jack-knifed and collided with itself. And a T-55 Soviet tank had come a-cropper on a highway divider and would up high-centered, three and a half feet in the air.

When the Iraqis had tried to leave Kuwait City, early on the second day of the ground war, they headed en masse up the road to Basra using both sides of the six-lane highway. About thirty-five miles north of the city, near a low rise called Mutlaa Ridge, this bug-out was spotted by US Navy A-6 attack planes. These Navy pilots must fly New York City traffic helipcopters in civilian life, because they knew exactly what to do. They went right to the spot on the crest of the ridge where the road narrows from six lanes to four and plugged that bottleneck with cluster bombs.

“We’ve got a real tie-up, outbound on the Basra Road this morning, due to explosion, incineration, mutilation, and death …”

The panicked Iraqis tried to drive around the burning wreckage and became bogged down in the sand. The traffic jam spread out and backed up until it was nearly a half-mile wide, more than a mile long, and contained at least fifteen hundred vehicles. Then all the airplanes that the US Navy, Marines, and Air Force could must came in and let loose with everything they had. One Navy pilot called it “shooting fish in a barrel”,but it was more like sticking a 12-gauge shotgun into a goldfish bowl.

The wreckage was still smoldering four days later. It didn’t look like a battlefield. There were some Iraqi Army vehicles in the mess – tanks opened up like bean cans and armored personnel carriers turned into giant hibachis. But most of the transport had been stolen, stolen in a perfectly indiscriminate frenzy of theft that left the ground covered with an improbable mixture of school buses, delivery vans, sports coupes, station wagons, tank trucks, luxury sedans, fire engines, civilian ambulances, and semi-tractor trailers. I saw a motor scooter, a Geo Tracker, and – the vehicle that would be my personal last pick for something to escape in – a cherry-picker crane. It looked like a bad holiday traffic jam in the States except charred and blown-up, as though everybody in Hell had tried to go to the Hamptons on the same weekend.

Allied burial details were moving through the wreckage, but some bodies were still lying there, crispy and twisted in agony. I felt sorry for the poor dead bastards, but it was a reasonable, detached kind of sympathy that came from the went-to-college part of the brain. I was intellectually obligated to feel sorry for them, but, after seeing what they’d done to Kuwait City, I had more of an Old Testament feeling in my heart:

“Then did I beat them as small as the dust of the earth, I did stamp them as the mire of the street, and did spread them abroad.” - II Samuel 22:43 –

Of course, I didn’t do this personally, but my tax dollars helped. I caught myself giggling at the carnage. This supposedly formidable and certainly ruthless army had not only run from a fight like a flock of broiler hens, but it had also tried to carry with it every item of portable swag in the Emirate. The killing field here was littered not so much with corpses as with TVs, VCRs, Seiko watches, cartons of cigarettes, box lots of shampoo and hair conditioner, cameras, videotapes, and household appliances. School desks, tea sets, stuffed animals, silverware, an accordion, and a Kuwaiti family’s photo album were all being dragged back to Iraq. I saw a pick-up truck full of women’s ball gowns and another truck stacked with Pampers. A hot-wired camper van sat with two cans of club soda still resting in the dash-mounted drink gimbals. The camper bunks were filled with men’s boxer shorts, the price tags still on them, and the whole – camper van, club sodas, underpants, and all – was punched full of tiny holes like a cheese grater from cluster-bomb shrapnel. What we had here was the My Lai of consumer goods.

[JSteff]

"They should drop a supply of white flags in case the Iraqi's run low (unless they have used flags from France)."

I am sure the French do still have their old ones. They are family heirlooms kept clean, pressed, and neatly folded beside the stick to carry them. Yeah, some of those old "French implements of peace" are worth... well, lot's. Really

[PeaceBeWithYou]

Ze French invented ze ascot so they would never be without a white hankerchief with which to surrender.

[ladtx]

....most soldiers were hiding their white flags,"

Those white flags probably say "Made in France" on them.

[concerned about politics]

Radio Iraq......

Even more puzzling than its name is Radio Tikrit's evolving message. When it started up, the station railed against the U.S. and Britain as "ravens of evil," mimicked news reports on Iraqi media and featured a talk titled "Before It's Too Late" that urged Iraqis to prepare to battle America.

Gradually, though, antagonism toward Washington softened and praise of the Baghdad regime soured into criticism.

By last week, the station had completed a 180-degree turn. It denounced the Iraqi leader as a "tyrant" and lambasted his family, according to BBC Monitoring, a service that transcribes, translates and analyzes foreign broadcasts. The "Before It's Too Late" slot featured a letter from an "honorable officer of the Republican Guard" urging fellow officers to abandon the Iraqi dictator: "You would be fools not to realize the extent of popular wrath that awaits you if you do not leave this gang and flee."

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