The Iraq War (28 page)

The two American generals may have been influenced by the example of the British operation which had successfully secured Basra, in turn itself modelled on earlier operations in Northern Ireland. They may independently have come to the conclusion that raids into the city would not be effectively opposed by what remained of Saddam’s forces. Whatever the inspiration, in the early morning of 5 April 3rd Infantry Division’s armoured spearhead, 1st Battalion 64th Armoured Regiment (1–64), moved out of its overnight positions to attack up Highway 8 directly into the southern suburbs, with the ‘régime district’ of ministries and residential palaces as its objective.

Central Baghdad was still full of fighters of various denominations, Saddam
Fedayeen
, Republican Guard, regular army and foreign fanatics; the intelligence staff’s assessment was that only
two Republican Guard brigades and 15,000
fedayeen
remained available to Saddam, who had apparently transferred control of the defence to his two sons, Uday and Qusay, neither qualified to direct fast-moving military operations. Few of the defenders on the morning of 5 April, moreover, were prepared for the appearance of the Americans. Iraqi disinformation had done them a disservice. Though denials by the Minister of Information, Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, soon to be celebrated about the world as ‘Comical Ali’, that the invaders had reached the capital, mixed with assertions that they were being thrown back with heavy losses, brought heart to supporters of the régime, they did nothing to present the fighters on the ground with the facts. The advancing Americans of 1–64, moving at high speed down boulevards leading to the city centre, found fighters eating breakfast, evidently oblivious of imminent danger. Farther down the street other fighters, alerted by the sound of approaching gunfire, hastily manned defensive positions. They drenched the American armoured columns with fire from their Kalashnikov assault rifles and RPG-7 grenade launchers, all of it ineffective against the armoured skins of Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles. The deeper the Americans penetrated, the more intense became the martyr impulse. Fighters appeared in hundreds along the sides of the streets into the city, mounting suicidal assaults with weapons instantly overpowered by those of the invaders.

The Americans on the ground were supported by Americans in the air, flying A-10 Warthog anti-tank aircraft. American gunship helicopters also added to the carnage, attacking Iraqi military positions and vehicles identified in the city streets. The fighting was not altogether one-sided. An Abrams tank was set on fire by a hit from an RPG-7 launcher but the crew were able to evacuate the vehicle without loss. Many of the armoured vehicles of 1–64 had been hit by anti-armour weapons, mostly RPG-7s, but none had been disabled. After repair and re-supply, 1–64 was ready for the next phase of operations. It had suffered no human casualties at all. By contrast hundreds of Iraqi fighters had been killed in the street combat.

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 concrete 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.’