Chaos Ruled Before Iraq's Military Fell

Boston Globe 8/25/2003 Vivienne Walt

BAGHDAD -- Iraq's armed forces virtually evaporated during the war in March and April because of a confused and often ineffectual command structure, which oversaw hundreds of thousands of disaffected soldiers who had no idea of the battle plan. After decades of dictatorship, the war was fought with little gusto by anyone other than Saddam Hussein's inner circle, former Iraqi officers say.

In interviews with infantrymen and officers, including a senior general from the elite Republican Guard who is in hiding, a picture emerges of spectacular military collapse.

Command orders flip-flopped regularly or were ignored by officers. Soldiers were exhausted, hungry, and overwhelmed by US bomb strikes. Above them were officers who had received e-mail and telephone calls before the war, from Iraqi contacts working abroad for US forces, urging them not to fight back.

These factors could help explain why tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers felt safe enough to simply walk away from the battlefield in the war's second week. Mass desertions accelerated April 1, about 10 days after the combat began.

But the punishment for abandoning combat -- execution -- was ignored across Iraq. No one who was interviewed could remember a soldier being punished for desertion. Instead, commanders seemed to turn a blind eye, occasionally leading the stampede themselves, according to low-level soldiers and ranking officers.

"Even in the Republican Guard, the men were left with no choice -- either they left their posts or they died," said the Republican Guard general, whose troops were regarded before the war as the Americans' most formidable foes but nevertheless felt that defeat and death were inevitable.

A Globe reporter sought out former Iraqi officers and soldiers in Hussein's stronghold of Tikrit and in Baghdad to determine why Iraq's forces collapsed so quickly and completely. Some spoke openly; others seemed guarded. The general, who believes he is being sought by US forces, agreed to describe his wartime experiences after being assured his identity would not be disclosed. Other officers interviewed by the Globe confirmed the general's identity.

Despite its fearsome reputation, the Republican Guard seemed to have no clear plan of how to defend the country, partly because the unit's leader -- Qusay Hussein, Saddam Hussein's 37-year-old son -- had no military experience.

"At first, we thought our best tactic was guerrilla warfare in the cities," said the staff general. "We decided we'd fight them block by block like they did in Vietnam because the Americans' high-tech weapons would be useless in that situation."

Terrified of US capture, the general traveled to the interview at his friend's house in a beat-up sedan, accompanied by one of Hussein's former bodyguards. Dressed in sandals and a gray robe, he looked like a simple peasant.

The urban guerrilla plan, touted by Hussein early this year, was scrapped before the war as officers feared chaos and mass casualties. "Then we decided instead to stop them on the outskirts of Baghdad," said the general, 42.

The leaders' unrealistic appraisal of Iraq's military capabilities left their soldiers and Iraqi citizens ill prepared for the sudden collapse.

"We were told it would take the Americans about three or four months to reach Baghdad and that then we would defend the city by street fighting," said Colonel Ziad Tariq, 42, a helicopter pilot who spent 22 years in Iraq's military, describing the urban guerrilla plan. "There were rings of defenses before Baghdad. There were troops in the south and Republican Guard divisions ringed around the city. We were told the Americans would have to kill all of them to reach us."

In fact, US forces swung through the desert in the west and up the Euphrates River to the east, barely stopping as they marched to Baghdad.

The Iraqi soldiers in their path were hopelessly ill trained. "We never hit a single target," said Assad Ashur, 23, a Republican Guard soldier who had been stationed in Kut, about 100 miles southeast of Baghdad on the Euphrates. "One mortar we shot killed about eight Iraqi civilians."

Preparation for the air bombardment was little better. To survive the "shock and awe" bombing campaign, scores of key officers had rented houses in Baghdad in early March, fearing their offices would be bombed. But few had telephones installed or had radio communications.

Instead, commanders dispatched orders on slips of paper carried by car or motorcycle to the houses.

"At first, this man would come sometimes 20 times a day with orders from the commander," said Colonel Rafed Abdul Mehdi, who had organized deployments for Baghdad's antiaircraft missiles from a house in east Baghdad. "We would move the missile launchers several times a day to avoid bombs."

But as US forces intensified their bombing of Baghdad, almost all who operated the missiles abandoned the launchers, rendering the messenger's job irrelevant. "I think the last time he came was April 5," said Mehdi, 38.

The Republican Guard's system of defense, massing its men in concentric rings around Baghdad, also proved disastrous.

"We had four concentric circles of defense. But when the US moved up through the desert, we were told to go back into the cities," said Lieutenant Colonel Tariq Mohammed, 36, of the Republican Guard's crack Medina Division, based in Suwayrah, about 35 miles southwest of Baghdad. "The huge mistake was moving the Republican Guards all the time. The soldiers were exhausted."

By early April, most of the division's soldiers had drifted off. On April 6, Mohammed simply got into his car and drove to Baghdad.

Early in the war, critical orders were ignored. One required Republic Guard officers to bomb strategic bridges over the Euphrates, in an attempt to slow down the coalition's advance. But the bridges were never bombed, according to two officers.

At one key bridge, "the wires attached to the detonator were cut and so the man responsible for blowing it up could not do it," said the general. He said it was not clear whether soldiers scuttled the plan deliberately.

Tariq, the helicopter pilot who was stationed in a house in eastern Baghdad with several pilots, said there was shock as the BBC Arabic service described the Americans' rapid stampede north toward the capital. Like Mehdi, Tariq relied on orders that a colonel delivered by car.

He said anxiety was high in his rented house, where six pilots were stationed. But their commanders displayed no urgency.

"Every day, the only orders we got was to stand by. Stand by, stand by, stand by," he said with a note of exasperation. "Some days, the colonel brought us green boxes of bullets to fight with."

The soldiers considered some orders absurd. "They told us if we had to flee, we should dismantle the antiaircraft missiles so the Americans couldn't use them," said Mohammed Al-Baghdadi, 21, an infantryman with the Medina Division. "It was ridiculous, as if the Americans wanted our old junky weapons. The war was a joke. I left on the sixth day and walked to a cousin's house in the next village."

Other orders were reversed so frequently that officers were paralyzed by confusion. "On April 7, the colonel came and told us to go fly helicopters, to bomb the American tanks near Al-Dorah" in southern Baghdad, Tariq said. "One hour later he returned, saying to stand by. The next day, the colonel returned again and told four pilots to go bomb the Americans."

But the four men left the house.

At that point, American soldiers were eliminating more-zealous fighters from the Special Republican Guard and Fedayeen Saddam, in a major battle on Baghdad's western outskirts. And US Marines were pushing through eastern Baghdad. By then, the Republican Guard senior commander, Abu Ali, had been abandoned by all his men.

On April 9, as US Marines were pulling down Hussein's statue in eastern Baghdad's Firdos Square, Abu Ali fled into the western Baghdad neighborhood of Adamiyah, a Sunni Muslim stronghold where many officers have traditionally lived. There, he said, he fought his last lonely battle against the Americans, firing desperate shots with a pistol at US tanks, from between buildings. "It was as if God had sent hell down to earth and ascended into the sky, leaving us there," Abu Ali said. "I hope until I die never to see such a thing again."