Casualties Among Elite Iraqi Troops Were 1,400, Senate Told

The U.S.-British air campaign against Iraq last month killed or wounded an estimated 1,400 members of President Saddam Hussein’s elite military and security forces, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told Congress on Tuesday.

Army Gen. Henry H. Shelton, filling in one of the last key questions about the mission, said U.S. intelligence sources indicate that the airstrikes hit about 600 members of Iraq’s Special Republican Guard and about 800 members of the Republican Guard.

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Shelton acknowledged that damage estimates are not complete, and he called the casualty counts “unconfirmed.”

U.S. defense officials have sometimes been reluctant to estimate enemy casualties, partly because of the limits of intelligence and partly because of the negative public reaction to the inaccurate estimates of the Vietnam War.

A senior defense official said the Iraqi estimates were pieced together “from various sources, using various methods,” and he acknowledged that they might not be precise. They were released “to answer the questions of members of Congress,” this official said.

Outside experts speculated that the Pentagon might also want to float the numbers to frighten people close to Hussein, and perhaps also to help defend the mission. Some critics in Congress and elsewhere have contended that Operation Desert Fox, while punitive, had little value in forcing Hussein to abandon his weapons programs.

During the air campaign, U.S. forces went out of their way to try to avoid civilian casualties, officials said, but the barracks and other facilities of elite troops were a top target. The U.S. military hoped that by piling up casualties in Hussein’s elite forces, it could frighten others around him--and perhaps help undermine his regime.

U.S. officials have said they believe that casualties among Iraqi civilians were light. U.S. and British forces had no casualties.

The Special Republican Guard functions as a sort of palace guard. Those hit, officials say, were in charge of providing security for Hussein’s arsenal of “weapons of mass destruction”--his chemical and biological weapons inventory and what is believed to be a rudimentary nuclear program. Out of 100 targets that were hit, 18 were security facilities for the Special Republican Guard, which some experts say may number 25,000.

U.S. warplanes also went after nine command and barracks facilities of the Republican Guard, a larger force of about 80,000 that has been considered Hussein’s most valuable conventional military asset.