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Posted on 04/10/2003 9:44:18 PM PDT by 68skylark
WASHINGTON, April 10 — Out of sight of television cameras, some of the heaviest fighting in Iraq has been raging for nearly three weeks near the town of Qaim on the Syrian border, where American Green Berets and British commandos have been attacking units of Iraq's Special Republican Guard and Special Security Services, according to senior military and defense officials.
The Iraqi forces in the area, near the Euphrates River and alongside a rail line, have been defending a large compound that includes phosphate fertilizer and water treatment plants. American officials say the sheer tenacity of the Iraqi fighters has led them to suspect that they may be defending Scud missiles or other illicit weapons.
The Qaim area, nearly 200 miles northwest of Baghdad along the most direct route from the Iraqi capital to Syria, was a launching point for Iraqi ballistic missile attacks during the 1991 Persian Gulf war. It was also home to a plant used by Iraq in 1980's for uranium processing, and it has been identified since by American officials as a possible site for any effort to revive Iraq's nuclear weapons program.
The reported doggedness of the Iraqi resistance has prompted some speculation within the Bush administration that the Iraqi forces might be defending members of the Iraqi leadership trying to flee to Syria. But defense officials said it was more likely they were trying to shield weapons or weapons programs.
"They're protecting something, that's for sure," one senior American military official said. For now, he said, the main objective of the United States is "to keep their head down so they can't fire anything off."
Despite many days of attacks by the Army's Special Forces, including what one general called "unconventional warfare direct-action missions," along with repeated airstrikes, the Iraqi forces have not given up.
Pentagon officials said that contact had been made with one Iraqi commander in the Qaim area in an effort to negotiate a surrender, but that that attempt had broken down.
With ground access limited, the American command has made the compound the target of heavy air attacks but has refrained from destroying the buildings altogether, apparently out of concern about causing wider harm if the area was being used to house chemical or biological weapons or material for nuclear weapons.
The mystery of the fierceness of armed Iraqi resistance in the remote border town is among many uncertainties that senior American officials are weighing as they survey the battlefield in Iraq, where about one-third of the country still lies outside American control, according to senior Pentagon officials.
Perhaps chief among those worries, officials said today, is the location and intentions of Iraqi militias and security forces who were battling the United States in Baghdad and other cities but have now mostly fled.
"Have they run away for good, or are they operating more like the Al Qaeda model, to go away for awhile and then come back?" a senior defense official said.
On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld cited intelligence reports saying that some officials of the Iraqi government had fled to Syria and, in some cases, onward to third countries. Today, defense officials said there was no evidence that those believed to have fled included any senior Iraqi leaders.
At the Pentagon, officials would not say how many American and British soldiers had been involved in the battle in the Qaim area, and they declined to estimate the size of the Iraqi resistance.
But they described the fighting as an example of what they called the significant amount of unfinished business in the war. The American task in seizing the area is complicated by the fact that there remains no easy way soon to bring American armor or other heavy fighting forces to places like Qaim.
Allied forces to date have not pushed forcefully west of Baghdad, with only Special Operations units deployed in areas like Qaim and near the point in western Iraq known as H3, which is a base for American, British and Australian forces along the route in from Jordan.
Perhaps chief among the remaining challenges, officials say, may be the effort to oust members of the Iraqi regime from Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown, seen as the most worrying remaining base for armed Iraqi opposition. Iraqi positions in and around Tikrit have been bombed heavily in recent days, but it is believed to be defended by the Special Republican Guard and other Iraqi security forces who are a more difficult target from the air.
"I think we are prepared to be very very wary of what they might have, and we are prepared for a big fight," Maj. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, vice director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said of Tikrit at a Pentagon briefing today.
Asked about the fighting in the Qaim area, Maj. Gen. Victor Renuart, director of operations for the Central Command, described the Iraqi defenders as including "a substantial presence of Iraqi Special Republican Guards paramilitary forces."
"We believe that those forces have been significantly reduced over the last week or two, and we believe we're in a position where we can begin to control that area more freely," General Renuart told reporters at the Central Command headquarters in Doha, Qatar.
But, he cautioned: "I can't put a time on that to you. We'll continue to work that. We continue to have some discussions with leaders in that area, and we believe we're making good progress."
The Qaim compound includes the site where Iraq extracted uranium for its nuclear weapons program in the 1980's, but it was destroyed by bombing during the 1991 war.
More recently, however, American intelligence officials and other experts have pointed to satellite photographs showing activity at the compound that raised questions about whether Iraq might have rebuilt a uranium extraction plant at the site, possibly even underground.
In an effort to repudiate American claims that it was stockpiling nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, Iraqi officials allowed Western reporters to visit one building in Qaim last September. Reporters were flown by helicopter to the site, and were accompanied by Hussam Muhammad Amin, head of the Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate, the office used for liaison with United Nations inspectors.
The inspectors searched a site in Qaim December, scouring a uranium mine that yielded the "yellowcake" uranium dioxide that Iraq tried to enrich in the 1980's and early 1990's for nuclear weapons. As with other searches by the United Nations teams in the months before the American invasion, that investigation uncovered no evidence of any banned weapons.
Our thoughts are with the brave troops engaging the enemy -- those that we know about and those that we don't know about.
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Glad we now have much more robust inspection regime in place.
Gotta love the persuasive language we use in our "discussions."
That should flush out the rats.
You are getting warm. This site may possibly be the junction point where Iraqi WMDs were moved into Syria.
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