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Date Posted: 23:47:53 04/09/03 Wed
Where Has The Iraqi Army Gone?
By Abdul Raheem Ali, IOL Cairo Staff
CAIRO, April 9 (IslamOnlin.net) - The disappearance of the Iraqi army in Baghdad, no doubt, has become the troubling question now and the talk of many people, who believe that the Iraqi army vanished into thin air.
“The cakewalk entrance of the U.S. troops into the heart of Baghdad can be explained in accordance with three key scenarios,” Mohammed Abdul Salam, a military expert at Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies (ACPS), told IslamOnline.net Wednesday, April 9.
The military expert said that the massive U.S.-led air strikes on the positions of the Republican Guard units around Baghdad were effective and put an end to their resistance.
As for the second scenario, he said, the Iraqi regime committed a blunder when it divided the Republican Guard into small units, which led to their disintegration.
‘A Deal’
“The third one has to do with a deal hammered out between the leaders of the Republican Guard to lay down their arms without resistance,” he added.
Abdul Salam further said the latest events in Baghdad came as a real surprise to all military analysts.
He, nevertheless, said that the U.S. control over Baghdad has marked the collapse of the Iraqi government but not the regime, which is based on large-scale section of the Iraqi population, military formations, political groups and coherent tribes.
“To my way of thinking, the new Iraqi regime would only be stabilized if it was merged into the old guard. I believe that there is no other option but to this one to form a new Iraqi regime,” he said.
“Add to that, we can never talk about a stable Iraq without tackling first a number of thorny issues such as the Sunni Arabs, cadres of Baath party, tribes and clans close to Saddam and the Iraqi armed forces,” he added.
Future Holds Myriad Of Surprises
Abdul Salam said that the few days ahead hold a lot of surprises, noting that no one could predict the next moves precisely.
“Has war come to an end? Would resistance pockets carry on with their fighting? No body knows,” he said.
The military expert also went for the claims that Saddam had taken shelter in his northern home town of Tikrit.
“The U.S. troops have already begun laying siege to Tikrit but I think the U.S. will seek a political solution (to the crisis) since they do not want to engage in more battles with the Iraqi fighters, hoping that it would someday rebuild the Iraqi army,” he said.
Abdul Salam also said that the situation in southern Iraq is far from being stable yet, pointing out that the U.K. troops there wanted to stabilize the region by appointing some chiefs of Iraqi tribes to run the southern cities.
He further said that the northern part of Iraq “derives its sensitivity from the presence of the Kurdish fighters (peshmerga).”
“From the very beginning, the U.S. troops did not intend to capture its cities, including Kirkuk and Mosul, and that’s why they did not intensify their air strikes there,” he added.
As for the central part of Iraq, Abdul Salam said that the situation there would rely on the U.S. future plans for post-war Iraq.
The military expert said some locals have already taken control of a number of Iraqi cities, asserting that they would target the members of the ruling Baath part in these cities.
Earlier in the day, U.S. tanks and troops poured into the heart of Baghdad with Marines sending a towering bronze statue of Saddam Hussein crashing to the ground amid loud cheers from a handful of Iraqis on a central Baghdad square.
http://www.islamonline.net/english/News/2003-04/09/article13.shtml
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