A rchive Date
[ 22-03-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Iraq ]
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[http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2003/03/21/48257-cp.html
Large numbers of Iraqi soldiers surrender
Sat, March 22, 2003
SOUTHERN IRAQ (CP) - Hordes of Iraqi soldiers, underfed and overwhelmed, surrendered Friday in the face of a state-of-the-art allied assault.
An entire division gave itself up to the advancing forces, U.S. military officials said. The division - the 51st Infantry Division, 8,000 men and as many as 200 tanks, a key unit in the defence of the southern city Basra - was the largest defection in a day when Iraqi forces showed signs of crumbling.
The surrendering soldiers were not the fabled and well-fed Republican Guardsmen who anchor Iraq's defence - for the most part, these were a rag-tag army, many of them draftees, often in T-shirts. Their small arms could accomplish little against opposing forces wielding 21st century weaponry.
"I kind of felt sorry for them," said one U.S. military official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"A lot of them looked hungry. They haven't been fed in a while."
He spoke after U.S. marines and their allies took control of the strategic port city Umm Qasr and with it, Iraq's access to the Persian Gulf. The out-classed Iraqis fought with small arms, pistols, machine-guns and rocket-propelled grenades.
Authorities said Iraq's southern oil fields would be secured by day's end.
At the same time, the U.S. army's 3rd Infantry Division surged 160 kilometres into Iraq. The U.S. 101st Airborne Division joined the fight. Much more was to come - an extraordinary land-based armada of allied weaponry and troops was caught in an enormous traffic jam in Kuwait, ready to strike when it could cross the border.
Once Royal Navy minesweepers clear the water of mines, Umm Qasr will become the main gateway for humanitarian aid to flow into Iraq, British Press Association reports said.
British officials said the oil infrastructure at Umm Qasr was not destroyed by Iraqi troops.
"Any attempt by (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein to release oil into the gulf and create an environmental disaster has been thwarted," British Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon said.
"It is not just a matter of protecting the oil fields from sabotage, but more widely to ensure that to the greatest extent possible, the civilian infrastructure of Iraq remains intact."
Admiral Michael Boyce, chief of the British defence staff, said he had no information about the situation in oilfields near Baghdad, the capital.
"We are absolutely determined not to allow Saddam to (cause) yet more damage to the lives of his people through some sort of scorched-earth policy," Boyce said.
Authorities said Iraq's southern oilfields would be secured by day's end. British Army specialist units, including the Royal Engineers, bomb clearance teams and nuclear, biological and chemical units, were helping American troops secure the
oilfields.
There were pockets of resistance, some of it stiff; a second combat death was reported Friday, a member of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force who was wounded while battling a platoon of Iraqi infantry.
But often, the opponent advanced with a white flag in hand, instead of a rifle.
Within a few hours of crossing into southern Iraq, the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit encountered 200 or more Iraqi troops seeking to surrender. One group of 40 Iraqis marched down a two-lane road toward the Americans and gave up.
Another group of Iraqi soldiers alongside a road waved a white flag and their raised hands, trying to flag down a group of journalists so they could surrender.
Forty to 50 Iraqi soldiers surrendered to a U.S. marine traffic control unit. They came down the road in the open back of a troop vehicle, their hands in the air for just over a kilometre before they reached the marines.
Their decision to give up the fight was not unexpected or unprompted; for months, Iraq has been bombarded with messages from the Americans, urging its soldiers to refuse to fight.
At a Pentagon news conference Friday, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld called upon Iraq's military to "do the honourable thing, stop fighting that you may live to enjoy a free Iraq, where you and your children can grow and prosper."
No one knew for sure how many Iraqis had surrendered. Rumsfeld said he knew of a few hundred, and others who just quit fighting. "A lot of people just leave and melt into the countryside," he said.
Rumsfeld said the allied forces were advancing, and now controlled "a growing portion of the country of Iraq." The captured territory included two airfields in western Iraq.
The ground advance into Iraq appeared to be moving faster than planned. Units reached locations in Iraq 24 hours ahead of their expected arrival time, according to several reporters attached to those units.
The army's 3rd Infantry Division was following a path through the desert west of the Euphrates River, avoiding populated areas. It appeared that strategists sought to minimize civilian and military casualties by flanking most Iraqi units, and going straight for the Republican Guard around Baghdad.
At the same time U.S. forces supported by two battle groups of the British 7th Armoured Brigade - the Black Watch and the 1st Battalion, the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers - advanced to the outskirts of Basra, the British Press Association reported.
The bulk of the allied force hadn't even entered Iraq yet.
There was a huge traffic jam at the border - thousands of vehicles parked in parallel rows, nothing but columns of trucks, humvees, oil tankers, flatbed tucks, armoured vehicles and vehicles of every stripe, from horizon to horizon. The traffic was so bad that it took 6½ hours for one unit to go 82 kilometres in swirling dust.
Crossing the border Friday morning, the 3rd Battalion of the 7th Marine Infantry faced little resistance. Tanks attached to the battalion attacked five Iraqi tanks just north of the border, destroying them easily.
The battalion passed the brown, stone rubble of several buildings it had shelled just minutes before - the air still held the acrid smell of explosives - and at least five enormous pictures of a smiling Saddam, some with him wearing a robe, others with him in a headscarf, that stood intact at the border post.
They reached the town of Safwan, where speakers warned Iraqis to stay out of the marines' way, although a few ventured outside.
The marines later took control of positions mostly abandoned by Iraq's 32nd Mechanized Infantry Brigade, blowing up a few abandoned tanks and armoured personnel carriers and engaging in short firefights with a few Iraqi soldiers who had stayed back to defend their headquarters and barracks or were unable to flee in time.
In northern Iraq, meanwhile, U.S. forces fired five missiles at the base of an Islamic militant group allegedly linked to the al-Qaida terror network, Kurdish officials said.
Washington has claimed that the group, Ansar al-Islam, connects Saddam to al-Qaida. The Kurds also said Ansar could be an obstacle in any U.S.-led offensive on Saddam through the north.
A ground assault against Ansar, using Kurdish forces, was also being prepared and could start soon after Friday night's strike, said a high-level official of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Kurdish militia fighters and heavily armed U.S. Special Forces poured into the area near Halabja, which neighbours the Ansar stronghold. A Kurdish military official, also refusing to be identified by name, confirmed the report of the missile strike.
Pentagon officials said Friday night they had no information about a strike on Ansar.
Ansar al-Islam, a militant Islamic group with 700 hardcore members, controls 18 villages near Halabja, located next to the Iranian border.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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