AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War (28 page)

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Authors: Larry Kahaner

BOOK: AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War
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Even if marking and tracing were to begin tomorrow, however, there simply are too many older guns and caches of ammunition around to make any difference for the foreseeable future. Particularly in the case of AKs, it could take fifty years for some of today’s weapons to cease working; that, combined with the guns’ high tolerance for poorly made and deteriorating ammunition, means they could be functional and untraceable for decades. Johan Peleman, a Belgium-based arms investigator who has worked for the United Nations, put it starkly: “Tracing a twenty-year-old Kalashnikov, back to whoever delivered it, is virtually impossible.”
 
Some of these twenty-year-old AKs surfaced in Iraq after the United States invaded that country in 2003 in an effort to oust Saddam Hussein and destroy his supposed weapons of mass destruction. Once again, the Soviet-designed AK would go head-to-head with the U.S.-designed M-16, just as it had done in Vietnam more than forty years earlier.
 
8
 
AK VERSUS M-16: PART 2
 
IN 1999, IRAQI PRESIDENT Saddam Hussein ordered construction to begin on what would be the world’s largest mosque. On a hundred-acre site, fifteen miles outside of the capital city of Baghdad, the huge house of worship was part of the dictator’s plan to strengthen his iron-fist grip on the nation by appealing to the region’s Muslims even though his Baath Party had a history of disavowing religion and regularly harassing and killing Muslim fundamentalists.
 
The “Mother of All Battles” mosque was not only an attempt to curry favor with Iraq’s Muslims but also to pay homage to the Gulf War of 1991. Hussein had dubbed it the Mother of All Battles, in which Saddam’s invasion of neighboring Kuwait prompted a counterattack by a U.S.-led, UN-sanctioned coalition that drove Iraq out of the small, oil-rich country but left him in office with diminished military power.
 
Opened on April 28, 2002, Hussein’s birthday, the mosque was a tribute to its megalomaniac maker. The building housed a handwritten Koran reportedly produced from three pints of Hussein’s blood mixed with ink and preservatives, a pool in the shape of the Arab world, and a twenty-four-foot-wide mosaic of the president’s thumbprint. Outside, forty-three-meter-high minarets, symbolizing the forty-three-day conflict with the United States, reached skyward. These minarets were fashioned in the shape of Scud missiles, the NATO name for the R-11 missile built by the Soviet Union during the cold war. Hussein’s military blasted Scuds into Israel and Saudi Arabia during the Mother of All Battles. These crude, inexpensive, but effective short-range missiles were often launched from trucks, and could deliver a conventional explosive warhead, a small nuclear bomb, antipersonnel bomblets, or biological or chemical weapons.
 
The mosque also sported four outer minarets. Like those closest to the main building, these towers were exact images of another Soviet-made, simple, inexpensive, and mobile weapon that Hussein revered. Standing thirty-seven meters high—signifying Saddam’s birth year, 1937—these barrel-shaped minarets were replicas of Tabuk assault rifle barrels, Iraq’s version of the AK.
 
Although Saddam’s regime officially denied that the minarets were designed like either of these weapons, the look is unmistakable. In the case of the AK minarets, the towers even included the gun’s distinctively shaped handguard that provides a tight grip on the barrel during automatic fire. Like Scud missiles, the AK offered Saddam Hussein simple weapons born from the Soviet utilitarian mind-set. They were cheap and deadly.
 
Although coalition bombings in 1991 destroyed much of Iraq’s air force, Scud missiles, and tanks, Hussein’s regime retained its arsenal of small arms, especially AKs. In fact, by March 2003 when the Iraq war, or Operation Iraqi Freedom, as it was called by the United States, commenced, Iraq’s arsenals were brimming with small arms, perhaps as many as seven to eight million pieces. These weapons would prove deadly to U.S. troops once major hostilities ended, but were not considered a threat by military planners when the war began.
 
The war commenced with air and ground attacks led by Vietnam veteran General Tommy Franks. Believing that Iraq had violated UN sanctions against building and warehousing weapons of mass destruction—chemical, biological, and nuclear arms—President George W. Bush gave Franks the go-ahead. Although military pundits had expected lengthy air bombings as a prelude to entering ground forces, as in the 1991 Gulf War or the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Franks instead ordered ground troops to enter the southern tip of Iraq through Kuwait and make their way to Baghdad as fast as they could. Just as the German army motored swiftly through the Ardennes in 1940, bypassing small villages on the way to Dunkirk and Paris, U.S. troops traveled at top speed, ignoring small towns on their way north to the capital city. Pentagon planners believed that by attacking Baghdad and destroying the nation’s command-and-control capabilities, they would cause the regime to disintegrate, and the Iraqi people would overwhelmingly support the invaders as liberators. Once Baghdad was under U.S. control, Pentagon strategists believed that these bypassed towns and villages would fall into line.
 
As U.S. forces advanced across Iraq, one of their first objectives was to secure the Rumaila oil fields, an area that extends underground into Kuwait. During the Gulf War, Hussein’s soldiers ignited theses wells not only to hide their movements amid the dense smoke but to distract coalition forces. Franks was determined to prevent Iraq’s army from burning the oil wells again and ordered GIs to secure the fields. This action would also pay postwar benefits, because President Bush hoped that the country’s valuable oil supply would help defray the costs of Iraq’s reconstruction.
 
One of the groups assigned to the area was the 1st Battalion of the 5th Marines. Wearing bulky and hot chemical protection suits, Alpha Company was one of the first large ground units to make its way across the Kuwaiti border. After an eight-hour drive, it reached Pumping Station No. 2. Once a base for an Iraqi brigade, the station was largely abandoned save for a few die-hard fighters. The marines took several Iraqi prisoners during skirmishes, but then something unexpected occurred.
 
A half dozen Iraqis, possibly from Hussein’s elite Republican Guard, took off in a brown Toyota pickup truck, in what several marines later said resembled a drive-by shooting. The retreating Iraqis fired AKs wildly out the windows, hitting Second Lieutenant Therrel “Shane” Childers, in the lower abdomen. Childers, a thirty-year-old marine from Harrison, Mississippi, and a graduate of the Citadel military college, died almost immediately. He was the first U.S. casualty of Operation Iraqi Freedom. For most of the marines in his company, it was their first look at the AK in combat, but it would not be their last. What perhaps frightened them most was the way these soldiers used their weapons. While U.S. troops were highly trained and disciplined and taught to make every shot count, these soldiers fired indiscriminately, without regard to whom they would hit. They were successful. They had killed one marine and injured several others. How could a professionally trained force engage and win against this type of soldier?
 
Other advancing troops avoided major cities except when necessary to gain control of strategic bridges across the Tigris and Euphrates. The first indication that the U.S. plan was running into trouble—although it was eclipsed in the news by the stunning and swift march toward Baghdad—occurred in the bypassed city of Basra, Iraq’s second largest city, just north of the Kuwaiti border. As U.S. troops pushed onward, British troops were sent to secure it. To the surprise of military brass, it took two weeks of fighting for the British to enter the city, a conflict that included the largest tank battle the British had seen since World War II. Once Iraq’s tanks were destroyed, however, fighting still continued, turning into close-quarter urban warfare. British troops found themselves under constant small-arms attack from Iraqi army regulars and fedayeen fighters.
 
Fedayeen
is the plural of an Arabic word meaning “one who is ready to sacrifice his life for his cause.” The first fedayeen in the eighth to fourteenth centuries were a group of Ismali Muslims belonging to the Shia sect of Islam, who terrorized the Abbasids, the Sunni Muslims who ruled Baghdad. This religious group was also known by the name
hashishin
because it was claimed that they put themselves into a fierce fighting-frenzy state by taking hashish before battles. (The modern word “assassin” is derived from their name, as many of their terrorist tactics involved murdering rulers.)
 
There have been several notable fedayeen groups throughout history. This latest group of fighters, Fedayeen Saddam, were handpicked by Hussein’s regime and put under control of his son Uday. Their loyalty to Hussein and the Baath Party assured they would fight to the death against any invader. This paramilitary group, whose numbers may have reached thirty thousand to forty thousand fighters, were used by Hussein to put down opponents and smuggle arms and drugs in the region. Despite their numbers, the international community knew little about them until Hussein pressed them into military service during the U.S. invasion. Their weapon of choice was the AK.
 
As the U.S. military pressed toward Baghdad, their supplies lagged behind. At about the 250-mile mark, supplies on the front lines became scarce—food, water, and fuel—and supply convoys had to play catch-up. These lightly armored trucks were easy prey for fedayeen ambushes. Although many of the convoys were given cover by helicopters, others were attacked by hit-and-run raids. Fuel tankers were favorite targets because they were slow-moving, and exploding, burning fuel had a dramatic effect.
 
American troops entered Baghdad certain that total victory was near. When the city fell on April 9, 2003, the fedayeen were in disarray, but many of them carried on the fight, mainly armed with AKs and RPGs. Something else occurred, however. Despite the Bush administration’s contention that the war would be over quickly, and the Iraqi people would welcome the coalition forces as liberators, what followed was a protracted guerrilla war for which U.S. forces were not properly outfitted.
 
The days following the taking of the capital city were marked by looting and an inability of American forces to maintain order. To Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the Iraqi people, oppressed for decades by Hussein, were simply letting off steam.
 
Street violence continued. As U.S. forces attempted to contain it, many Iraqi people grew tired of what they saw as a growing American occupation. In addition, Hussein had gone into hiding and many citizens were afraid that the Americans would abandon them as they had done in the 1991 Gulf War, leaving an opening for Hussein to return to power, more vengeful against opponents than before. Moreover, many Iraqis were still angry about U.S. bombings during the 1991 war that had destroyed large sections of the country’s infrastructure. Electricity was flowing at less than a quarter of its prewar amount and damaged water treatment plants allowed raw sewage to flow into the Tigris River, a prime source of freshwater for many Iraqis. Many Iraqis blamed the United States for the widespread disease that followed. Although most Iraqis despised Hussein’s rule, at least they had had freshwater, electricity, and other basic services, none of which existed now.
 
During the uncertainty and chaos that followed the coalition’s swift victory, millions of small arms, mainly AKs, were looted or sold from Hussein’s huge armories. One of the main occurrences took place in May 2003, when L. Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, decided to dismiss all Baathist members from government positions and disband the Iraqi army. Although it may have been a correct decision—and perhaps the only logical one considering circumstances at the time—it caused major social disorder and violence as these groups let loose the nation’s small arms to almost anyone. Not unlike the situation during the disbanding of the Soviet Union, military officers and government employees sold the country’s weapons as a way to make money, and also to foment opposition against the government in power; in this case, the U.S.-run provisional government. The weapons landed in the hands of law-abiding but nervous civilians. They also reached Baathists loyal to Hussein and other opponents of the U.S. occupation who used them to run a protracted urban war.
 
As we’ve seen in many other countries, the street price of the AK is an accurate indicator of the degree of social order and citizen anxiety. In the months prior to the invasion, the price of an AK varied but stayed within a range of $150 to $300, with Chinese models on the lower end and Russian models at the high end. Oddly enough, despite Hussein’s dictatorship, private gun ownership in Iraq was fairly high, especially among the loyal Sunni Muslims, for whom a $150 license fee permitted as many small arms as they wanted. It was not unusual for households to maintain several small arms, almost always an AK among them, even in the large cities such as Baghdad and Fallujah. During the worst disorder just after the fall of Baghdad in March and April 2003, prices plummeted as military inventories flooded the market. In Basra, AKs were so ubiquitous that they were almost worthless, one of the causes of the British difficulties maintaining control of that city.
 
About six months later, as Baghdad settled down and coalition forces got a better handle on widespread looting and street violence, AK prices reverted to previous levels. By then, the bulk of AKs from military arsenals either had been destroyed by coalition forces or distributed to Iraqis. As the summer progressed and insurgent groups coalesced behind political and religious leaders in opposition to the Provisional Authority, demand grew again to the point where small arms were being imported from the neighboring countries of Iran and Syria.

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