Robert Fisk: Iraqi capital's defenders look far from surrender

The road to the front in central Iraq is a place of fast-moving vehicles, blazing Iraqi anti-aircraft guns, tanks and trucks hidden in palm groves, a train of armoured vehicles bombed from the air and hundreds of artillery positions dug into revetments.

Anyone who doubts that the Iraqi Army is prepared to defend its capital should take the highway south of Baghdad.

How, I kept asking myself, could the Americans batter their way through these defences? For kilometre after kilometre they go on, slit trenches, ditches, earthen underground bunkers, palm groves of heavy artillery and truckloads of combat troops in battle fatigues and steel helmets.

That a Western journalist could see more of Iraq's military preparedness than many of the reporters supposedly "embedded" with British and American forces says as much for the Iraqi Government's self-confidence as it does for the need of Saddam's Government to make propaganda against its enemies.

True, there are signs of the Americans and British striking at the Iraqi military. Two gun pits had been turned to ashes by direct air strikes and a barracks - empty like all the large installations that were likely to be on the Anglo-American target list - had been turned into grey powder by missiles.

But other APCs, including an old American 113 vehicle - presumably a captured relic from the Iranian Army - remained intact. If that was the extent of the Americans' success south of Baghdad, there are literally hundreds of military vehicles untouched for 100km south of the capital, carefully camouflaged to avoid air attack.

Like the Serb Army in Kosovo, the Iraqis have proved masters of concealment. An innocent wheatfield fringed by tall palm trees turned out, on closer scrutiny, to be traversed with bunkers and hidden anti-aircraft guns. Travelling the long highway south by bus, I could see troops pointing skywards. If hanging concentrates a man's mind wonderfully, fearing an air strike has almost the same effect.

Driving the highway south, a lot of illusions are blown from the mind. There are markets in the small towns en route to Babylon, stalls with heaps of oranges and apples and vegetables.

The roads are crowded with buses, trucks and private cars - far outnumbering the military traffic, the truckloads of troops and, just occasionally, the sleek outline of a missile transporter with canvas covers wrapped tightly over the truck it is hauling. This was not a population on the edge of starvation; nor indeed did it appear to be a frightened people. If the Americans are about to launch an assault through this farmland of canals and forests of palm trees and wheatfields, it looked at first glance like a country at peace.



The images sometimes moved towards the boundaries of comprehension. Children jumping over a farm wall beside a concealed military radio shack; herds of big-humped camels moving like biblical animals past a Soviet-made T-82 battle tank hidden under palm branches; fields of yellow flowers beside fuel bowsers and soldiers standing amid brick kilns; an incoming American missile explosion that scarcely prompts the farmers to turn their heads.

Was there a lesson in all this? I had perhaps two hours to take it all in, to wonder how the Americans could batter their way up this long, hot highway - you can feel the temperature rising as you drive south - with its dug-in tanks and APCs and its endless waterlogged fields and palm plantations.

The black-uniformed men of the Saddam Fedayeen with red and black kaffiyeh scarves rounds their heads, whom I saw 160km south of Baghdad, were kitted out with ammunition pouches and rocket-propelled grenades. And they did not look to me like a "degraded" Army on the verge of surrender.

Of course, it all might be an illusion. The combat troops I saw may have no heart for battle. The tanks might be abandoned when the Americans come down the highway towards Baghdad.

Saddam might flee Baghdad when the first American and British shells come hissing into the suburbs.

But it didn't feel like that yesterday. It looked like an Iraqi Army and a Ba'ath Party militia and the Fedayeen that were prepared to fight for their leadership, just as they have at Umm Qasr and in Basra and Nasiriyah and Suq al-Shuyukh.

Or was it something else they might be fighting for? An Iraq, however dictatorial in its leadership, that simply rejects the idea of foreign conquerors?

- INDEPENDENT

Herald Feature: Iraq war