Any of you familiar with what happened in Stalingrad in 1943? Then the prospect of a ground war should send a chill down your spine... the Stalingrad street wars, which lasted over a year, took some 15 million lives, out of the 27 million the Russians suffered in the hands of the Nazis.

The battle of Baghdad
By Peter Spiegel and Stephen Fidler
Published: November 21 2002 20:33 | Last Updated: November 21 2002 20:33


If Wafic al-Samarrai is correct, a US-led military campaign against Iraq will begin much the way it did a decade ago: with large-scale bombing of strategic targets across the country. But from there, the former Iraqi intelligence chief argues, things will begin to look very different. First, he says, the US will send in the 82nd and 101st airborne divisions from the Mediterranean or Turkey into the western desert to prevent Saddam Hussein from using his missiles against Israel. Then, US-led forces will attempt to foment uprisings and target military installations to encourage the Iraqi army to lay down its arms.


In the end, however, Mr Al-Samarrai - in common with many other military analysts - sees a possible final showdown in Baghdad. And there, he argues, is where the trouble could begin. Mr Hussein has pulled back his best and most loyal troops - the Republican Guard and the Special Republican Guard responsible for defending him - to the suburbs around the capital. "They will fight and retreat to the centre," says Mr Al-Samarrai. "The Americans are worried about this stage."

Whatever Washington's eventual decision on a war plan, there is - despite official protestations to the contrary - genuine concern in the Pentagon about the prospect of a Battle of Baghdad.

Publicly, senior defence department officials express confidence about fighting in the city of 5m people. "The army is ready," Thomas White, the army secretary, said last month. "There's a great deal of technology that's being applied to make the individual soldier more effective in what is a very complicated and dangerous environment."

But others inside the Pentagon, including those involved in the planning process, are not so sure. Experts on urban warfare at the defence department and outside Pentagon advisers argue that the military has largely ignored urban operations for decades - despite high-profile setbacks for US troops in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993 and the disaster the Russian military has suffered in Grozny, Chechnya.

Indeed, people familiar with US military thinking on urban operations say the tactics and planning for warfare in cities have changed little since the 1968 battle of Hué, the largest single engagement in the Vietnam war and itself an operation that relied on tactics from second world war-era urban conflicts. "I don't think there's any doubt we'd be using the same tactics as in Mogadishu," admits one Pentagon official involved in planning for urban warfare. "Those guys in Mogadishu were the best-trained guys in the world. How could they be in a situation that could turn so shitty, if we're so good?"

A former senior Pentagon official in the Clinton administration adds: "We haven't yet taken the steps we need to take to do operations in cities without acceptable risk to Americans and non-combatants."

Because of such considerations, say people close to the Pentagon, military planners are hoping that victory is won before fighting in Baghdad starts. Indeed, US military intelligence reckons Mr Hussein's army will defect in large numbers once serious fighting begins. And such thinking is not limited to the US military. Saad Al-Obeidi, one of the leaders of the Iraqi Military Council, an exiled group of former army officers, says: "I don't think there will be fighting on the streets."

Mr Al-Obeidi, a former brigadier who says he directed psychological operations in the Iraqi army, bases his judgment in part on experiences in 1991. He took part, he says, in informal discussions among high-ranking officers about what to do if coalition forces entered Baghdad. "The conclusion was that if the Americans parachuted 100 soldiers into Baghdad, we would not fight them."

Some reports suggest Mr Hussein is already struggling to secure the loyalty of his forces. Lt Gen Thomas McInerney, a retired senior officer formerly at air force headquarters in Washington, told a recent congressional hearing that the Iraqi leader killed 10 Republican Guard generals, led by a three-star, on February 14 and on June 1 he arrested 85 officers. "So he has a major problem."

Yet even if the US military hopes for surrender, it must plan for a worst case in a sprawling city where military targets have been deliberately placed close to - and sometimes atop - civilian buildings. As one Pentagon official currently working on urban combat issues puts it: "The ugly little secret is: what if [Saddam Hussein] decides to fight? Then what?"

Experts concerned about the Pentagon's lack of readiness blame the American military's much-documented tendency to inertia, particularly after decades of cold war in which both the US and the Soviet Union had strategic reasons to avoid cities. Nato allies sought to stay away from urban areas because, under most predicted scenarios, the cities they would be fighting in would be their own.

The Soviets, in turn, saw cities as places their troops would become bogged down. "Until 1989, our focus was on north-west Europe," says Russell Glenn, an army veteran who studies urban operations at the Rand Institute. "For a multitude of reasons, people envisaged war as in the open and cities were places to avoid and go around."

Indeed, the US military's rule on city fighting has long been: don't. "Tactical doctrine stresses that urban combat operations are conducted only when required and that built-up areas are isolated and bypassed rather than risking a costly, time-consuming operation in this difficult environment," says the US Army Field Manual from 1978, which is only now being updated.

This aversion has been reinforced by US military experience. Before Mogadishu and Hué, there was Manila where, as the second world war drew to a close, an estimated 100,000 people died when forces led by Gen Douglas MacArthur fought to dislodge the Japanese.

In Manila, as in Hué, US troops started with restrictive rules of engagement. But in both battles, those rules had to be relaxed; US forces prevailed only with the help of heavy artillery and air bombardment. In Grozny, Russian troops achieved "victory" only with the unrestrained use of firepower and a lack of concern about civilian casualties. Victory in Baghdad achieved by similar means might well become a strategic and public relations disaster.

Not everyone in the US military, it seems, has woken up to this danger. One civilian official recalls conversations with senior officers who argue that the battles in Hué and Mogadishu were victories, since enemy forces in both cities sustained far heavier casualties than did US troops. "We haven't treated American success by body counts since the battle of the Somme," he says.

But avoiding urban warfare is no solution either. Duane Schattle, a former Marine recently picked by Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, to help form an urban combat planning group in Norfolk, Virginia, asks: "What's the history lesson of Grozny? It's that if your strategy is to avoid [urban warfare], it's going to be bad."

The battle of Baghdad
By Peter Spiegel and Stephen Fidler
Published: November 21 2002 20:33 | Last Updated: November 21 2002 20:33

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If Wafic al-Samarrai is correct, a US-led military campaign against Iraq will begin much the way it did a decade ago: with large-scale bombing of strategic targets across the country. But from there, the former Iraqi intelligence chief argues, things will begin to look very different. First, he says, the US will send in the 82nd and 101st airborne divisions from the Mediterranean or Turkey into the western desert to prevent Saddam Hussein from using his missiles against Israel. Then, US-led forces will attempt to foment uprisings and target military installations to encourage the Iraqi army to lay down its arms.