WASHINGTON April 5 —
The American commander of the air war over Iraq said Saturday the
Republican Guard has ceased to exist as a cohesive fighting force.
The choice facing remnants: "We either kill them or they give
up."
Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Moseley also said in a 90-minute
telephone interview from his command post in Saudi Arabia that
allied planes on Saturday began flying missions over the Iraqi
capital that are designed to support any future U.S. ground invasion
of downtown Baghdad.
He said U.S. planes are now on station over Baghdad 24 hours a
day, ready to direct strike aircraft to their ground targets inside
the city and to organize the air battle, a mission the military
calls airborne forward air control. It is performed by a wide
variety of Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps planes, including F-16
and F/A-18 fighters as well as A-10 attack planes.
As of Saturday, at least two forward air control planes were over
Baghdad one on either side of the Tigris River that runs through the
capital capable of calling on any of about one dozen strike planes
also aloft continuously in support of any ground action, another
official said.
The strike planes, like Air Force F-15 Strike Eagles and Navy
F-14 Tomcats, are armed with a variety of weapons, including
laser-guided bombs and "inert" bombs, such as concrete-filled bombs
that are effective against fixed targets with less risk to nearby
civilian structures.
U.S. officials hope the regime of Saddam Hussein will surrender
or be overthrown internally before it becomes necessary to launch an
all-out assault on the capital, home to 5 million people. Moseley
and others have sought to convince Saddam's loyalists that their
fate is sealed.
"There's no way out for these guys," he said.
The Pentagon, meanwhile, reported that the number of Americans
killed in action in Iraq rose to 79, including six confirmed deaths
from the downing of an Army Black Hawk helicopter Wednesday near
Karbala. There are eight Americans missing in action and seven held
by Iraq as prisoners of war.
Moseley spoke with reporters at the Pentagon as thousands of U.S.
troops gathered on Baghdad's outskirts the 3rd Infantry Division
arriving from the southwest and the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force
from the southeast. Elements of the 3rd Infantry made a brief foray
into Baghdad.
Moseley said the allies have such dominance of the airspace over
Baghdad that a Predator drone reconnaissance plane flew over the
city for 12 hours on Friday. He cautioned, however, that while Iraqi
air defenses have not been effective against allied planes, they are
still a threat.
Similarly, the three-star general said the Republican Guard that
forms the backbone of Saddam Hussein's army is still putting up a
fight, though not in large groups that could be effective.
"The Iraqi military as an organized defense in large combat
formations doesn't really exist any more," he said. Some parts of
the Republican Guard are trying to escape and regroup.
"We will continue to apply decisive pressure. We will continue to
kill these guys until they give up," Moseley said.
When the war began March 20, Iraq was believed to have six
Republican Guard divisions providing concentric rings of defense
around Baghdad and Tikrit, Saddam's hometown north of the
capital.
Days ago U.S. officials declared victory over two of those six
divisions the Medina armored and the Baghdad infantry. Some of the
rest of them may have pulled back into Baghdad, officials said.
Moseley said he believed that was futile because the Iraqi
leadership's ability to command and control its forces has been so
heavily damaged that they cannot organize a fight.
"The preponderance of the Republican Guard divisions that were
outside of Baghdad are now dead," he said. "I find it interesting
that folks say we're softening them up. We're not softening them up.
We're killing them."
Moseley directs the air portion of the Iraq war from a command
post known as the Combined Air Operations Center, a sprawling
complex at Prince Sultan Air Base, south of the Saudi capital. He
uses a range of intelligence from air and space sensors to plot the
direction of the air campaign using about 2,000 aircraft flying from
five aircraft carriers and about 30 land bases in and around
Iraq.
He made other points about progress in the air campaign:
The Iraqi air force has not flown a single mission in the war.
Moseley said U.S. warplanes have bombed Iraqi airfields so
effectively that there are only a "handful" of landing surfaces
available to Iraqi planes anywhere in the country.
Some targets in southern Iraq that allied warplanes planned to
attack in the opening hours of the war were taken off the strike
list because allied ground forces had already entered Iraqi
territory. The ground forces moved earlier than planned in order to
secure the southern oil fields, he said.
Air power is supporting U.S. and Kurdish forces in northern Iraq
in a wide variety of ways, including providing close air support for
Kurdish ground troops fighting Iraqi government forces.
photo credit
and caption:
Plane crews do final checks on
an F/A-18C Hornet loaded with bombs as they prepare to launch
after sunset off the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk in the
Gulf, Saturday April 5, 2003. Planes from the ship continued
missions in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom over Iraq. (AP
Photo/Steve Helber)
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