by John Keegan
There had also been heavy fighting during 5 April, persisting into 6 April, on Route 1, the highway leading out of Baghdad to Tikrit, Saddam’s seat of family and tribal power. It ran due north out of the city through a series of concrete intersections and, as the American pincers closed round Baghdad from west and east, it became the only remaining escape route out of the city to what might still be a place of refuge. The 3rd Brigade Combat Team of 3rd Infantry Division was ordered to take and hold it, against at first small parties of escapees but later a flood of motorized fugitives protected by tanks of the Republican Guard. The fight to prevent their leaving lasted for ten hours and was heavily contested, eventually resolving into an armoured battle between Republican Guard tanks and the 7th Cavalry for control of the last bridge the road crossed out of the city. Eight tanks were destroyed before the Americans closed off the exit.
General Blount’s soldiers now controlled the western perimeter of the capital, as the Marines did the eastern. The Iraqis lacked the means to break the cordon from the outside and, though there were still considerable numbers of soldiers and fighters within the city, Blount had concluded that they lacked the spirit or organization to conduct an effective defence. He decided on a second ‘thunder run’, to be mounted by his 2nd Brigade Combat Team, led by Colonel David Perkins. If it made a successful penetration the raid would become a permanent occupation of the city centre. Perkins, who proposed the raid, was convinced that occupation was now possible, since he sensed from the tempo of the fighting that the defenders were on the point of collapse. Generals McKiernan and Franks, conferring with the divisions and brigade commanders via their sophisticated communications system – which allowed the high command to call up images of the battleground on their television screens in ‘real time’ – concurred.
Soon after 2nd Brigade Combat Team left its line of departure, however, the fighting took an unpleasant turn. The key points on the way towards the centre, particularly the ‘régime district’ of ministries and palaces the Marines were attacking from the other direction, proved to be three concrete overpasses on the network of internal city streets, codenamed by the Americans Curly, Larry and Moe. On the advance towards them, an Iraqi surface-to-surface missile, one of the few fired during the campaign since the fighting on the Fao peninsula at the outset, impacted near Perkins’s headquarters, killing five soldiers and damaging several vehicles. The missile strike caused disorganization and brief delay. Soon after it, however, 2nd BCT had resumed the advance, led by 1st Battalion 64th Armored Regiment, with seventy Abrams tanks and sixty Bradley armoured fighting vehicles. The enemy they encountered were mainly fedayeen, now somewhat better organized since the first ‘thunder run’ of 5 April. Obstacles had been improvised by overturning buses, trucks and construction vehicles, and strongpoints and barricades had been constructed along and across the streets. The obstacles were pushed aside by the tanks, acting as bulldozers. Colonel Perkins then judged the way into central Baghdad to be open and ordered 1–64 and its sister unit, 4–64, to press ahead. The régime district of ministries and palaces was an hour away. The district in between, formed of parks and wide avenues, offered good fields of fire and could easily be defended against fedayeen human-wave attacks. Blount approved Perkins’s plan on condition that his lead elements could be re-supplied with fuel and ammunition.
The fight for central Baghdad, launched up Highway 8 towards the Moe, Curly and Larry overpasses, became during 7 April essentially one of passing the resupply columns forward to the fighting troops. Responsibility for the operation moved to another battalion of 3rd Infantry Division, 3rd Battalion 15th Infantry Regiment (3–15), commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Steven Twitty. Twitty’s rapid assessment was that to guarantee the arrival of resupply at the engaged units he would have to secure and hold the three overpasses, Moe, Larry and Curly, the first a mile apart, Curly two miles farther on. Twitty committed his conventional infantry, mounted in Bradleys and protected by Abrams tanks, to Moe and Larry. Curly he had to consign to the battalion’s support units, which had some Bradleys but were largely equipped with obsolete M-113 armoured personnel carriers or with armoured engineer vehicles. The men of these units, trained for but not normally assigned to the infantry role, were suddenly to find themselves in the front line. Fortunately their commander, Captain Zan Hornbuckle, was much respected in the battalion as a leader and under his command 3–15 was successfully to defend all its strongpoints. Hornbuckle deployed his vehicles in cordons around Moe, Curly and Larry, which were encircled by entrenched Iraqi positions. As soon as the soldiers of 3–15 appeared, the Iraqi defenders began to attack, charging in successive waves on foot and in vehicles they had appropriated, taxis, cars and pickup trucks mounting machineguns, the ubiquitous ‘technicals’ of Muslim fighters all over the Middle East and Africa. In the aftermath of the battle for the overpasses, it became apparent that many of the enemy were not Iraqi but Syrians, who had crossed the border to fight the Americans in prosecution of the war against the Great Satan. They used mortars, could call on artillery but preferred, as almost all fighters in Iraq did throughout the campaign, to rely on RPG-7 rocket launchers, firing their projectiles in salvoes at close range. In response every unwounded American, and even some of the wounded, turned their weapons against the enemy.
The fighting was hottest at strongpoint Curly where Hornbuckle’s Sergeant-Major, Robert Gallagher, who had been wounded in the debacle in Mogadishu in 1993, convinced his senior officer that it was essential to demand reinforcements. B Company of 3–15 was alerted at short order and raced northwards to the relief, armoured vehicles intermixed with resupply trucks, with all soldiers, combat specialists or not, firing their weapons as they advanced. When B Company, 3–15, arrived at strongpoint Curly, five of the resupply vehicles, loaded with ammunition and fuel, were sent up in flames by fedayeen fire but the other fifteen survived and the American garrison of the position sustained the defence.
At strongpoints Moe and Larry the fight had meanwhile been going on for six hours. The American defenders were attacked by a car bomb driven by a suicide bomber at Larry but obstacles improvised by combat engineers arrested its impetus before it reached its target point. Car and bomber were destroyed by the detonation. At Moe combat engineers improvised other obstacles to block suicide bombers, while the commander on the spot organized counter-attacks to engage columns of Iraqi fighters set on attacking the position. Sixty Iraqi vehicles were destroyed and hundreds of fedayeen killed. All American forces in the city centre, despite 3–15’s delivery of fuel and ammunition, were now short of supplies. A reorganization of supply with the vehicles that had reached the focus of the fighting was hastily arranged and reinforcements from another battalion of the 3rd Infantry Division, 2nd Battalion 7th Infantry Regiment (2–7) were hurried forward to support 3–15. Strongpoint Moe was swiftly resupplied. Then 3–15 proceeded at high speed into central Baghdad. During the night of 7–8 April the centre and the régime district, already partly under the control of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, was completely secured.
The Marines had meanwhile closed up to the Tigris and its tributary, the Diyala river, on the south-east corner of the capital. In the right angle formed by the confluence of the Tigris and the Diyala stood a sprawl of poor housing, known as Saddam City, and a prison, military offices and the Rashid military air base. On the other side of Saddam City the roads led to the régime district, contained within one of the wide meanders of the Tigris. The three marine regimental combat teams, with their attached tank and armoured reconnaissance battalions and supporting artillery, were now deployed very close to the heart of the capital, in line with RCT 7 on the left, RCT 1 in the centre and RCT 5 on the right, across a front of about six miles. Between them and their objectives, however, lay the Diyala, which had steep banks offering few crossing points. There were two bridges in RCT 7’s area but for once the Iraqi engineers had done their work. A narrow pedestrian bridge had a ten-foot gap in the centre, the four-lane con
crete Baghdad Bridge had lost fifty feet of its centre span. The marine engineers reckoned that the gap in the pedestrian bridge could be repaired by pushing planks across, making it usable by infantry, but the concrete bridge would require major work. The bridging train would have to bring up and emplace metal spans to make it possible for tanks to be passed across.
Once over, the plan was for the Marines to push ahead in strength into the city and hold the ground taken. Unlike the army units of 3rd Infantry Division they did not intend to mount probing raids but to fight and take territory. The different plans reflected different organizations. Despite its title, 3rd Infantry Division had a heavy complement of armour of several types but relatively few foot soldiers. The marine regimental combat teams, by contrast, were largely infantry units. Traditionally the US Marine Corps has been and remains an infantry force and its battalions are trained and expect to fight on foot. Once across the river, they would fight their way down the city streets to secure the centre. The problem was to get over the Diyala, which was defended on the far bank by Iraqi entrenchments.
The initial crossing was made over the pedestrian bridge. Ferreting about in the debris that littered the area, the Marines of K Company, 3rd Battalion 7th Marines had found the necessary planks and also a metal gate. Shouldering the bridging material and formed in single file, they charged onto the broken bridge towards the far bank, thirty yards away. Iraqi artillery was firing – the artillery commander was heard on radio intercept attempting to correct his battery’s fire – and one shell killed or wounded four Marines just behind the point of assault. The assault team, however, reached the gap in the bridge, dropped the metal gate across it, threw the planks on top and charged on to gain the far bank. There was a little firing but it was ineffective. Almost all the defenders had fled and their entrenchments, when overrun, were revealed to be wrongly sited. Instead of having been dug behind the lip of the river bank, they were on the forward, exposed side and so useless.
The Marines who had crossed the pedestrian bridge at once fanned out to search the houses on the city side, breaking down doors, surveying the interior and shouting ‘clear’ as they raced from one to another. (Elsewhere in the city the Americans took paint canisters with them, to spray ‘C’ on buildings which had been found empty of enemy or obvious booby traps.) Journalists and photographers jogged along with the fire teams; this was a media war and the crossing of the Diyala one of its reportorial high points. Beyond the houses on the river bank stood a grove of palm trees, which threatened danger. It proved to be full of abandoned military equipment but the enemy had fled. Five hundred yards beyond the bridge the Marines paused to form a perimeter. A defensible bridgehead had been secured and the follow-up units could cross in safety. Still, however, danger threatened. First one and then another vehicle approached the marine positions down roads leading to the river and were engaged with machine-gun fire. Both were stopped, neither proved to be a military vehicle, several civilians were killed. The marine officers cursed. Such incidents had proliferated throughout the campaign. Civilian vehicles had time and again driven at high speed into firefights, as if their occupants were oblivious to the dangers of war all about them. It was pointless to order young Marines to hold their fire. Too many apparently disoriented civilian drivers had proved to be armed fedayeen or suicide bombers, bent on destruction. Yet some who were shot up as they careered into American roadblocks clearly were disoriented or in denial. One of the most bewildering characteristics of this strange war was the apparent refusal of civilians to accept that a war was indeed going on. They drove about, in vehicles easily mistaken for the ‘technicals’ used by fighters, as if the Americans should understand that they were on a family outing or their way to market, as they often were. The result was the spectacle of dead fathers or slaughtered children in bullet-riddled cars skewed across the roadway; incensed American soldiers, stricken with guilt at what they had done, took refuge in feigned indifference: ‘Why didn’t they stop? How can we tell? I’ve got a family too.’
The seizure of the pedestrian bridgehead simplified the crossing problem. While marine engineers worked to mend the break in the concrete Baghdad Bridge into Saddam City, another battalion had regained the bridge farther north and pontoon bridges were being laid in other places. The three marine brigades were now jostling for position to lead the charge into central Baghdad. An argument was also in process between commanders about whether to raid or to mount push-and-hold penetration operations. As intelligence accumulated, it was becoming clear that eastern Baghdad was a ‘target rich’ objective. Beside the Rasheed military airport, there was also the Saddam Fedayeen training centre, the Atomic Energy Commission, Baghdad University campus, the Directorate of General Security Headquarters, the Ministry of Defence, Fedayeen headquarters and one of Saddam’s palaces, the Al Azamiya. Eastern Baghdad was divided by marine staff officers into three regimental zones, while the regiments subdivided zones into battalion sectors, nine altogether. The battalion sectors were farther subdivided into six. Once one sector was secured, the troops were to move on to the next.
The advance of 1st Marine Expeditionary Force into eastern Baghdad during 7–8 April was not heavily opposed. Such resistance as the Marines encountered was disorganized. The abandoned Atomic Energy Commission was secured without meeting resistance. The advance into the university area on 9 April was more strongly opposed; stay-behind fedayeen made a stand in the middle of the campus, firing RPG-7s or Kalashnikovs at the advancing marines. There was, however, no real defence. Of the regular army and the Republican Guard there was no sign. The night of 8–9 April was disturbed by sporadic, ineffective firing. On 9 April, with the university campus taken, the Marines pressed on and soon reached Firdos (Paradise) Square, dominated by one of the many statues of Saddam Hussein found by the invaders throughout Iraqi cities. Iraqi opponents of the régime had already attempted to pull the statue down by throwing a loop around its neck and using muscle power. A marine armoured engineer vehicle now amplified their efforts. Its cable loop broke the statue’s supports and Saddam’s image collapsed face-forward revealing a shoddy framework of metal struts that had held it upright.
The fall of the Saddam statue on 9 April, televised across the world, was taken by its media to mark the fall of the Saddam régime. Yet despite the cinematic sensation of the event, many in the media resisted the impulse to exult. As representatives of the bien pensants in Europe and even parts of North America, many television and print journalists declined to celebrate the fall of the dictator the toppling of his statue symbolized. Monster though he clearly was, his humiliation at the hands of the capitalist system – the United States, the world’s largest economy, Britain, the fourth – rankled. In Saddam’s own world, many followed the media lead. Iraqis who had suffered under his selfish autocracy rejoiced. The beneficiaries were downcast, as was ‘the Arab street’ in general. A Jordanian refugee from Palestine told a BBC correspondent in Amman, ‘It’s just too painful. We Arabs were once a great nation. We were in Spain for 700 years. And where are we now? We’re beaten in our own homes.’
To most Europeans and Americans for whom the Arab kingdom of Spain and the Muslim domination of the Balkans, if remembered at all, are footnotes of history, Muslim fellow-feeling for Saddam is inexplicable. They genuinely regard him as a would-be accomplice of Hitler and Stalin who, like them, terrorized his own people and wished to mount a campaign of conquest and revenge against the liberal democracies of the West. Confident in the benevolence of their own societies, to which the Third World apparently wishes to migrate en masse, Europeans and Americans fail altogether to understand the hatred felt by the world’s outsiders, particularly fundamentalist Muslims, for their way of life. It is possible for Westerners intellectually to grasp the essentials of Muslim belief, that religious teaching should predominate in public affairs, that women should be modest in manner and dress and outwardly subordinate to men, that the premodern texts of the Koran and Sharia law should be accorde
d the respect due to literal truth; but they do not regard such beliefs as applying outside what they regard as the closed borders of the Muslim world. They are particularly resistant to the view that Muslim secularists, such as Saddam, should enjoy the liberty to organize a Muslim society as they choose while simultaneously invoking an Islamic right – the basis of the Ba’athist idea – to a special place in regional and ultimately world affairs. Saddam, as dictator of Iraq, was that most dangerous of individuals, a Muslim who could dodge between religious and secularist appeals to authority, personally loyal to neither creed, adept at exploiting the power of both over the minds of his followers.
The fall of Saddam’s statue on 9 April was swiftly followed by the occupation of the premises from which he and his intimates had exercised their dictatorial regime. The ‘palace’ so-called of Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s Deputy Prime Minister, was quickly taken. The occupation of the five ‘palaces’ – large, vulgar, recently built villas – allotted to Saddam’s inner family swiftly followed. Not without loss; though a hundred fedayeen were killed in the fight for the palaces, twenty-two Marines were wounded, in exchanges of fire with assault rifles and rocket launchers. The capture of Baghdad had been in many respects a model of a modern military operation, cunningly planned with every electronic aid, skilfully executed by highly trained troops. Even the best battles, however, have their price for the victors. The cost had been paid by the soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division and the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.