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Iraq
Pillar of fire waits for US in Kirkuk
2003-03-09
It will start with a pillar of fire. As the air-raid sirens sound over Kirkuk, Iraqi soldiers will rush from their foxholes, bunkers and fortified command centres and throw lit rags into huge pits filled with oil, benzene, petrol and rubber. The pits have been dug along all the major roads surrounding the city and in rings around it. The boiling cloud of thick, poisonous fumes will blind the American and British jets on their bombing runs and make parachute drops almost impossible. Then the Iraqi defenders will sit and wait for the onslaught.
"Allright Faisal, you run with the burning rag to the oil trenches and set them ablaze."
"And what are you going to do, Abdul?"
"I'll cover you."
"With what? It's an air raid!"
"I'll cover you with a shroud. Now git going!"
For the moment there is little movement along the front lines between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and the autonomous enclave run by the Kurds in the north. At Kala, near the city of Arbil, exchanges of fire are frequent. But at Chamchamal, 30 miles south of the eastern city of Sulaymaniyah, the lines are quiet. Last week Iraqi cannon fodder troops were clearly visible along the ridges that rise above the border posts. The Kurdish peshmerga militia watched their enemy lazily, waiting for the American precision munitions they believe will open their way into Kirkuk.
They're like the rest of us now, just waiting...
Kirkuk, a city of 550,000, is crucial. It is likely to be the site of one of the messiest and bloodiest battles. With its huge oilfields, critical strategic position just 120 miles north of Baghdad and its full-size runway it is a key target for the Americans. Hold Kirkuk and you hold the northern third of Iraq. The Iraqis are well aware of this. Though the disconsolate soldiers on the ridges above Chamchamal are from the 8th Infantry Regiment, a conscript unit, Saddam has been reinforcing Kirkuk with units of the elite Republican Guard.
When are these Brit writers ever going to learn that the RG's are not elite?
Kurdish officials told The Observer there are hundreds of tanks and artillery pieces massed around the city. In one village alone, Kamanji, there are 25 tanks and 10 anti-aircraft guns, travellers crossing into Kurdistan at Chamchamal said.
That's 35 targets. And a B-52 carries how many JDAMS?
Ten miles south of Kirkuk lies the huge Khalid bin Waleed base. It is protected by minefields, rows of barbed wire and dozens of machine-gun nests and bunkers. Just beyond the camp is a large airfield where dozens of helicopter gunships and MiG fighter jets are protected by concrete bomb shelters each with its precise GPS location known. Around them and the city itself are four rings of interlocking bunker systems and minefields.
Very formidable, indeed...
Although on paper Saddam's battle array around Kirkuk looks impressive the defences around the strategic city, whether or not obscured by clouds of swirling toxic smoke, are less strong than they might seem. Travellers report that Saddam's vaunted 'volunteer' militia are in fact press-ganged. Every night, a senior official from the Baath Party drives through Kirkuk in a red Volkswagen Passat sending out teams to conscript young men. For 4,000 Iraqi Dinars (around £1.50) the officials will 'forget' a household.
Corruption at every level. Remind me how the peaceniks think the Iraqis will fight for Saddam?
All the Kurds remember how in the spring of 1991 their lightly armed militia were able to seize Kirkuk after the militia, recruited by Saddam from certain Kurdish tribes, swapped sides. But the Kurds were only able to hold the city for 11 days before being routed by tanks and helicopters. Now everything depends on the Americans. 'With American help we can be there in hours,' said Mustafa Chaw Rash, a senior official with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of the two governing parties in the northern enclave.
Assuming the plan calls for stopping at Kirkuk and not going straight to Baghdad...
Yet there is little sign of any substantial presence of US forces in northern Iraq. The Turkish parliament's vote against allowing the deployment of US forces at Turkish bases has thrown Pentagon war plans into disarray. American military planners were hoping to deploy 62,000 men from the 4th Infantry Division. Now other options are being looked at, including a massive airlift of troops, possibly from the 101st or 82nd Airborne Divisions.
I think the 62,000 men figure includes more than just the 4th ID, unless it's grown...
However there are only three usable airstrips in Kurdish-controlled Iraq and facilities are still hugely limited. The single strips are around 3,000 yards long, only just enough for a large cargo plane. The only major airfields are at Mosul, the Iraqi-held city in the north-west, and, of course, at Kirkuk. The most likely scenario is a rapid build-up of lightly armed specialist troops protected by helicopters who would help local forces to penetrate quickly into Kirkuk and secure the strategic oilwells and the airfield. But such a scenario brings its own problems. Kirkuk is historically Kurdish but Saddam's 'Arabisation' policy, by which Kurds have been forced out of their homes through threat of torture or worse and replaced by Arabs from farther south, means that the city is now ethnically mixed. There is also a large number of Turcomans, a separate ethnic group of whom the Kurds have always been suspicious. Of all the cities in Iraq, the 'score-settling' in Kirkuk could be the worst.
Especially if the Turkish army rolls south.
Posted by:Steve White

#3  Not mention breathing all that crap.

I mean, like that's gotta be bad.....
Posted by: Michael   2003-03-09 12:27:08  

#2  What else for Sammy to do? He'll be hoping for more stray bombs too, don't forget, and who knows what he thinks he'll be able to get up to under his cloak of smoke? Sowing confusion's one of the best strategies left open to him.
Posted by: Bulldog   2003-03-09 11:23:30  

#1  It's difficult to think of anything more stupid than surrounding yourself with pits of fuel and lighting them off. For every U.S. pilot that is irritated by the smoke there will be 1,000 Iraqis choking on it. Truly natural selection at work.
Posted by: Tom   2003-03-09 11:12:21  

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