Central Front Holding, Iraqi Tour Indicates

For Brig. Gen. Abed Mulack Jabouri, the hardship of life at the front is at least partly mitigated by a few of the comforts of home.

The general’s private quarters, for instance, consist of a small suite of rooms outfitted with plushly padded sofas, a color television set with video recorder, an exercise bike and a queen-size field bed next to a framed portrait of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Being underground, the only thing it lacks is a nice view.

During a brief rest stop on the way to the central front, the sound of outgoing fire from nearby artillery positions seems strangely out of place. It is hard to imagine that the Iranian army is less than two miles away.

Yet it was along this very front and only the day before, Iraqi commanders said, that they crushed the second of two major Iranian offensives.

“They attacked from many directions at once on the night of Jan. 17,” said Lt. Gen. Abdul-Sattar Maani, commander of the 2nd Corps, which is defending this craggy region about 75 miles northeast of Baghdad. “But by 1 p.m. the next day, the battle was in our favor, and the enemy sustained heavy losses in men and equipment.”

Gen. Maani, briefing reporters who were taken on a tour of the central front Monday, said that in two large battles and several smaller engagements over the last six days, Iraqi forces had destroyed five Iranian infantry and armored divisions without allowing them to capture so much as “one inch of Iraqi territory.”

Gen. Jabouri, in another briefing, estimated that Iraqi forces had inflicted at least 6,000 casualties on the Iranians in the first battle, on the night of Jan. 13-14, and no fewer than 2,000 casualties in the fighting on the night of Jan. 17-18.

‘Littered With Corpses’

“The hills and dales were littered with the corpses of their bodies,” he said.

At the headquarters of the 2nd Corps, reporters were shown a pile of light weapons captured from the Iranians, including several rocket-propelled grenade launchers made in North Korea, an assortment of light and heavy machine guns and three recoilless rifles. In a leather box, alongside some gas masks and other paraphernalia, were several green plastic tubes labeled “atropine injection”--standard issue for troops of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as an antidote for nerve-gas poisoning.

From a hilltop bunker near Naft Khaneh, an abandoned Iraqi oil town on the border with Iran, the reporters witnessed a sporadic exchange of artillery fire. One Iranian shell landed on the far side of an Iraqi artillery position, sending up a cloud of smoke. Another landed about 1,000 yards behind the reporters’ vantage point.

Hills Heavily Fortified

The barren, dusty hills here are dotted with bunkers, artillery emplacements and tanks and armored personnel carriers dug into U-shaped fortifications.

But although Iraqi television has been featuring grisly close-ups of Iranian soldiers killed in the recent clashes here, nowhere that the reporters were taken did they see evidence of battle to match the ferocity of the fighting now taking place on the southern front, where Iranian troops are trying to advance on Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city.

This appeared to support the assessment of Western military experts in Baghdad that the Iranian attacks in the central sector last week were a series of probes designed to test Iraqi defenses and search for weak spots prior to launching a larger attack.

According to this scenario, the big attack in the central sector will be launched only when and if the Iranians feel they have established a large enough bridgehead in the south to make a determined push on Basra, about six miles west of the Iranians’ present positions, as reported by the Iraqi defenders.

‘A Classic Tank Battle’

“If the central sector really gets going, it will be a classic tank battle,” one Western military expert said. He noted that the Iranians have an estimated 1,000 tanks in the central region that they have not used yet.

Although the numbers are still weighted against the Iranians--the Iraqis have much more armor on their side of the border--a large-scale attack in the central sector would be aimed at drawing some of the Iraqi air power away from the southern front as the Iranians try to encircle Basra, 300 miles southeast of Baghdad, the military analysts said.

Gen. Maani conceded that the fighting on his front amounted to a tactical attempt by the Iranians to “force us to divide our forces in two directions.” But he maintained that the two most recent battles were much more than probes and resulted in staggering defeats for the Iranians.

He said he was expecting more attacks, but added, “We can fight them in two directions, we can fight them in three directons and, if they want, we can fight them in four directions.”

Questions Skillfully Parried

The general deftly wove his way through a minefield of questions about U.S. arms sales to Iran. Asked if the Iranians used TOW anti-tank missiles received from the United States against his armor, he replied that they had, but not effectively.

Asked if the satellite intelligence data reportedly provided to Iraq by the United States at the same time that it was sending arms to Iran had been a help or a hindrance, he replied, “If the United States is giving us some intelligence and on the other hand giving Iran arms, then it means they are trying to kill us both.”

Michael Ross recently toured the central front before returning to Baghdad.