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01.04.2003 [14:58]
Baghdad Battle Uncharted Territory; Expect Blood

AS SAYLIYA CAMP, Qatar (Reuters) - The last time an invading army tried to capture a city the size of Baghdad, more than 120,000 Soviet soldiers and Germans were left dead in the streets of Berlin.

No one yet dares imagine that the looming battle for Baghdad will be a replay of the battle for the German capital in 1945.

But with President Saddam Hussein and his loyalist fighters promising to battle the U.S.-led invasion force street by street, the Iraqi capital -- with its five million people -- could be the biggest urban battlefield since World War II.

U.S. warplanners are already preparing the public for the sort of bloodshed their troops have not faced in a generation.

"We're prepared to pay a very high price because we are not going to do anything other than ensure that this regime goes away," one senior official at the U.S. Central Command in Qatar said on Monday, speaking under condition of anonymity.

"If that means there will be a lot of casualties, then there will be a lot of casualties."

OVERCONFIDENT ATTACKERS

The pattern of urban warfare over the past few decades has been of overconfident attackers underestimating the scale of the task. Cities limit an attacker's technological advantage, and favor the defender who knows the streets.

On New Year's Eve 1994, Russian tanks rolled into the Chechen capital of Grozny, led by commanders who were convinced they would easily "liberate" the city of 400,000.

Lightly armed rebels caught the tanks in intersections and destroyed them with rocket-propelled grenades. Hundreds of Russian soldiers died in a single night.

To take Grozny, the Russians razed it, block by block, over two months. No one knows how many thousands of civilians died.

"The defenders of Grozny, who were very motivated, finally gave up after a month of bombing and the total destruction of the city. They said they just couldn't go on anymore, they had to stop," said retired Colonel Jean-Louis Dufour, author of "War, the City and the Soldier."

"I wonder whether the American strategy won't be similar. A bit less brutal, because they can't destroy all of Baghdad, but they can harass it permanently with bombs so (the defenders) are exhausted."

Lancaster University defense expert Tim Ripley drew comparisons with the unexpectedly dogged resistance Israel faced in its assault on the Lebanese capital in 1982 to curb the influence of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

"The best analogy is Beirut," he said, predicting that U.S. and British forces will face stiff opposition in Baghdad.

POLITICAL RISKS

From the outset, U.S. and British war planners, keen to win Iraqi hearts and minds in a war that has divided world opinion, have underlined a desire to avoid an all-out urban assault.

"Militarily it would be feasible but I think it would be disastrous politically," said William Hopkinson, an analyst at the Royal Institute of International Affairs.

"You can imagine it -- starving children, disease breaking out, and this going on for weeks. It would inflame the world and recruit lots of terrorists for (Osama) Bin Laden," he said, referring to the suspected mastermind of the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.

But if the Iraqi leadership is able to make a stand in the city, the alternative could be a long siege.

"It is difficult to say what will happen when the hospitals fill up with wounded and the food supplies start to run down," said Vladimir Kuzar of the Russian Defense Ministry newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda.

Taking Baghdad street by street would require a major force experienced in such warfare. Americans have little or no experience of urban warfare since they took the city of Hue in central Vietnam in a battle in 1968.

"Street fighting is extraordinarily difficult. It needs very well trained troops, which is not the case of the whole of the American army," Dufour said.

BASRA AS A REHEARSAL

Warplanners have signaled that the British operation around the southern Iraqi city of Basra will be a rehearsal of their tactics for Baghdad. British forces there have remained outside the town, raiding and striking at fighters loyal to Saddam.

They may yet be forced to go in to take it.

"Bear in mind they've been surrounding Basra for two weeks, and it still hasn't fallen," said Ripley, who is following the war at U.S. Central Command in Qatar.

"Bear in mind, Baghdad is a city five times the size, with far more people loyal to the regime. You can do the maths."

Even optimists talk of "bloody street fighting."

"The battle of Baghdad will be quick," declared Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in a New York Times Op-Ed piece headlined "And Now, the Good News."

"The coalition won't enter Baghdad in a plodding fashion and then take it block by block. Instead, it will gradually learn where Iraqi forces have set up provisional headquarters and strongpoints, and then seize them in a nighttime operation akin to an urban blitzkrieg.

"There will be bloody street fighting, but with Iraq's command centers fractured, the opposition forces will be piecemeal and isolated," he wrote.

Kenneth Pollack, a leading U.S. hawk on Iraq, expressed the hope in his book "The Threatening Storm, The Case for Invading Iraq" that there would be no battle for Baghdad.

If Baghdad must be taken, Washington would have to choose between a siege or an assault, he wrote. "Either way, a great many Baghdadis might die before we could get to Saddam." (Additional reporting by Gideon Long in London, Jim Wolf in Qatar and Tom Heneghan in Paris)

Источник: REUTERS