The Plan: Control City Step by Step

Saturday’s armored thrust into Baghdad marked the opening phase of a plan to take control of the Iraqi capital one section at a time, Pentagon officials said.

The tank foray was meant to send what one Defense Department official called “a powerful message” that allied forces can penetrate Saddam Hussein’s capital at will.

Underscoring that message, U.S. warplanes are flying over Baghdad 24 hours a day, giving ground commanders the ability to call in airstrikes on pockets of resistance almost instantly.

The step-by-step approach to asserting control over the capital is designed to avoid bloody urban battles and encourage cooperation from the Iraqi populace, officials said.

Future probes by U.S. armored and infantry units will measure resistance in various parts of the city to determine which areas to attempt to seize immediately and which to leave for another day.

U.S. military planners intend to restore water, electrical and other public services in each sector to encourage a return to routine. Once resistance is ended and civilian life begins to revive in one place, officials suggest, allied forces will move on to the next.

War strategists intend to advertise their gains by increasing television and radio broadcasts into the city. They plan to display maps showing which Baghdad districts are under allied control each day, a defense official said.

The messages, which would include announcements about the return of basic services to “liberated” areas, will be directed at the Shiite Muslims among Baghdad’s 5 million residents, many of whom have been persecuted by Iraq’s Sunni Muslim minority. U.S. planners hope members of the Shiite community will provide information on the hide-outs and weapons caches of entrenched Iraqi forces.

While creative, the strategy is risky, analysts say.

Like the earlier strategy of bypassing Iraq’s southern cities, the blueprint for occupying Baghdad is vulnerable to guerrilla tactics.

Under the plan, for example, allied ground forces, supported by Air Force and Navy planes, would ring the city to screen civilians who attempt to flee. That could expose soldiers manning checkpoints to suicide bombers.

Indeed, such an outflow has already begun, apparently triggered by the Iraqi regime’s decision to turn off lights and water in parts of Baghdad.

“Part of the U.S. strategy is to create a sort of semi-permeable seal around the city, where [Iraqi] military forces can’t go out and come in, but refugees can,” said Loren Thompson, a military analyst with the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va., public policy group.

“Inside of Baghdad, who knows what’s going to happen? So having cordoned off the city and knowing what they face, U.S. forces now have to do an intensive job of probing and analyzing to determine where the concentrations of resistance are and how to fracture them,” Thompson added.

Constant overflights of the Iraqi capital will be coordinated closely with American ground troops. Special operations ground spotters can call in nearly instant strikes on moving targets.

From his headquarters in Saudi Arabia, U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael “Buzz” Moseley told Pentagon reporters that bombers and helicopter gunships will offer cover for U.S.-led ground troops as they force Iraqi fighters into the open.

“We’re not softening them up. We’re killing them,” Moseley said of the recent attacks on Republican Guard and other Iraqi forces. “We either kill them or they give up. There’s no way out for these guys.”

The move to round-the-clock overflights reflects allied commanders’ confidence that the most dangerous elements of Iraq’s fixed and mobile antiaircraft batteries had been removed by continual pounding.

Among the weapons being used to hit such targets while minimizing casualties in the urban capital are 500-pound “smart” bombs without explosives, which destroy buildings by their impact alone. Such bombs, like the so-called cement bombs used by the U.S.-led force in Kosovo in 1999, lack the shock wave that can damage surrounding buildings.

Nevertheless, Army officials say the limits of air power in urban combat are likely to force American ground forces into battle against entrenched fighters. Airborne bombs, flying in at an angle, can cause more unintended damage to people and buildings than mortar or artillery strikes raining down on a target directly from above.

“This part of the war isn’t one that the Air Force is going to be able to win for us,” an Army Special Forces officer who fought in Afghanistan said on condition of anonymity.

“Ideally we’re just going to have the Iraqis surrendering en masse like they have been, but when you have those Iraqis who want to fight to the bitter end and give their lives for Allah, you’re going to end up having our 19-year-olds trying to root them out and getting hurt in the process.”

Army Green Berets and other special operations troops who specialize in finding targets for bombers are already in greater Baghdad, defense officials say, but the neighborhood-to-neighborhood work is expected to require the Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles used by the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, which carried out Saturday’s probe in Baghdad.

The 1st Marine Division, moving in from the southeast, also uses Abrams tanks, though its infantry vehicles have only light aluminum armor.

If the regime fails to crumble amid increasing allied dominance, U.S.-led troops could eventually face resistance that has been years in the planning.

The Special Republican Guard, part of Hussein’s innermost ring of defense, and various paramilitary groups are believed to have spent the years since the 1991 Persian Gulf War plotting their defense of the capital.

They have assessed which neighborhoods are loyal to the regime, officials say, and may use artillery fire, quickly deployed land mines and other tactics to try to steer an invading force into fighting on ground most favorable to the regime.

American military planners and some analysts say that carefully choosing the order in which neighborhoods are targeted could foil such plans.

“This could be over in a couple of weeks,” analyst Thompson said. “All the evidence points to the conclusion that the Iraqi government will not hold out much longer.”