The Battlefront: Combat In the Sand

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

It was not supposed to start this way. The standard scenario called for the long-awaited, and dreaded, ground war to begin in mid-to-late February with an all-out U.S. and allied aerial, artillery and missile barrage on the Iraqi army's fortifications in Kuwait, followed quickly by a massive tank and infantry assault. So how come the ground war began in the last days of January with an Iraqi attack? On a penny-ante scale, with about 1,500 men and 80-odd tanks and other armored vehicles initially engaged? Aimed at a Saudi Arabian ghost town?

Allied forces recaptured that town, the sprawling beachside community of Khafji, within a day, but victory came only after bitter street fighting. Artillery duels along the Saudi-Kuwaiti border and firefights between U.S. Marines and groups of Iraqi troops crossing that border continued into the weekend.

There were wildly confusing stories: of as many as 60,000 Iraqi troops massing around the town of Al Wafra, 37 miles from Khafji; of a column of 800 to 1,000 tanks and armored vehicles in that area -- or maybe it was a phantom -- moving south toward the Saudi border or north, away from it, under massive allied air attack or perhaps not. Late in the week allied commanders said they saw no pattern in Iraqi movements that would presage further raids.

% The biggest questions were how many more battles Saddam Hussein might initiate and on what scale -- and why he had ever gone on the attack at all. The Iraqi army fights most effectively from behind barbed wire, minefields and trenches like those it has dug in Kuwait. Why pull any troops and tanks out of the bunkers and holes in the sand, in which they had been fairly effectively hiding from air attack, and expose them to the full fury of allied air and artillery bombardment?

Riyadh, Washington and London buzzed with speculation about Saddam's strategy. The most popular theories:

-- Saddam was seeking a propaganda victory. He hoped to buck up the morale of both his populace and his troops after two weeks of unrelenting air bombardment by showing them, and the world, that he could still put up a fight and even momentarily take the initiative.

-- Khafji was a probing attack, perhaps the precursor of more. Saddam's forces have no spy satellites and have been unable or unwilling even to send reconnaissance planes into Saudi airspace. The only way Iraqi generals can find out how many troops, artillery and tanks are massing at which spots along the border is to send troops across to engage them.

-- Iraq is trying to throw sand into the gears of the allies' military preparations. Saddam might hope to delay or disrupt a possible allied flanking attack around the western tip of Kuwait by forcing American, British or Arab troops that have been moving west to shift back to the east. Perhaps he also tried to take some of the bombing pressure off his supply lines and rear installations by forcing the U.S. to divert planes into close support of ground forces along the border.

-- Saddam is getting desperate to start what he calls the "mother of battles." His plan has always been to inflict such heavy casualties on attacking allied ground forces that President Bush would seek some sort of compromise peace. But the allies unobligingly intend to hold off until weeks of bombing have killed more of the Iraqi troops, destroyed many of their fortifications and weapons, and cut off their supplies. Possibly the Iraqi leader hopes to goad his enemies into launching the land campaign prematurely.

If so, he is unlikely to succeed. Allied commanders vowed to start the main offensive when they are good and ready. Nor did they have to divert any air power. In fact, planes swarmed to attack Iraqi armor in such numbers that they got in one another's way. But enough U.S. and allied planes were still available to carry out a full schedule of attacks throughout Kuwait and Iraq. Militarily, said General Norman Schwarzkopf, top allied commander in the gulf area, the Khafji battles were about as significant "as a mosquito on an elephant."

In terms of effect on the future course of the war, that might be true. But as the first sizable ground battle, Khafji merits study. After the shooting ended, U.S. and British intelligence officers interrogated prisoners and pored over battle reports, trying to fill holes in what was still an incomplete picture.

The basic elements are clear enough. On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday last week, Iraqi troops, tanks and armored vehicles crossed the Saudi border at several points between Khafji and Umm Hujul, 50 miles to the west. On Wednesday night they occupied Khafji, six miles south of the border; it had been abandoned on Jan. 17 by residents fleeing out of the range of Iraqi artillery. Saudis and troops from the Persian Gulf sheikdom of Qatar, supported by Marine air attacks and artillery fire, retook the town on Thursday, but only after house-to-house fighting that raged from 2:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sniper fire could still be heard on Friday. Marine planes and artillery repulsed the attacks at Umm Hujul.

Statistically, the Iraqis took a beating. By Friday afternoon the Saudis and Qataris had captured 500 Iraqis in and around Khafji, according to a U.S. briefing officer in Riyadh. Allied officials said 30 Iraqis were killed and another 37 were wounded. Saudi casualties were not much lighter: 18 dead, 29 wounded and four missing.

Eleven Marines were killed in the fighting around Umm Hujul, the first known American battle dead of the war (a number of flyers have been listed as missing in action). An AC-130 gunship with a crew of 14 was shot down over Kuwait, and a male and a female soldier on a "transport mission" near Khafji were missing. The woman, Army Specialist Melissa Rathbun-Nealy, might be the first female American soldier ever to become a POW (though some nurses have been captured in previous wars).

American A-10 attack planes and Cobra and Apache helicopters and infantry weapons appeared to be quite as deadly as advertised against Iraqi armor. General Schwarzkopf would confirm only 24 Iraqi tanks definitely destroyed, but other counts for the border battles as a whole ran as high as 80 vehicles. Correspondents who were allowed into Khafji Thursday afternoon reported that the streets were littered with the burning hulks of Soviet-made armored personnel carriers, knocked out by American TOW missiles fired by Saudi and Qatari infantrymen. U.S. Marines lost three light armored vehicles (LAVs) in the fighting around Umm Hujul.

The battle also had some unpleasant surprises for the U.S. and its allies. Despite widespread reports of low morale among Iraqi frontline troops, those in Khafji fought tenaciously, prolonging the battle for hours after the Saudis announced they had retaken the town. One column of tanks approached the Saudi border with their guns pointing backward, which allied forces took as a sign that the troops manning them wanted to defect; instead the Iraqis swiveled their turrets around rapidly and opened fire. There was a bitter possibility that the very first Americans known to have died in combat in the gulf, the 11 Marines, were killed by misguided missiles from U.S. warplanes rather than by Iraqi fire. An investigative team was trying to determine exactly what kind of projectiles had struck their LAVs. Friendly fire may also have been responsible for another American death, on Saturday, when a Marine convoy was apparently hit by cluster bombs.

Perhaps the most prominent lesson of Khafji is also the simplest: the Iraqis, in General Schwarzkopf's words, "certainly have a lot of fight left in them." That is hardly surprising. Early predictions of quick and low-cost victory came mainly from U.S. politicians and Arab diplomats, while the professional military has been cautious in warning against any such assumptions. Nonetheless, the question arises as to whether the air campaign has been quite as successful, and proceeding as close to schedule, as is generally believed.

Figuring out how the air strikes are faring is difficult for two reasons: 1) the generals have never announced, even inferentially, a schedule against which U.S. and allied efforts can be measured -- if in fact they have one; 2) they may well have difficulty themselves determining how much destruction the bombs have wreaked. Damage assessment is a tricky art even in the case of structures such as bridges. It is of course obvious if one has been hit, but figuring how long it might be unusable requires some uncertain judgments: How extensive are the repairs required? How quickly are they likely to be done? The judgments get more difficult when the focus shifts, as it is doing now, to such an elusive target as enemy troops.

At an allied air base in the gulf area, for example, a specialized group of U.S. Air Force F-4G Wild Weasels continually land with film taken by nose- mounted cameras. Less than 10 minutes after a Weasel touches down, its film is rushed into one of a cluster of van-size steel boxes, bolted together at the edge of a runway, that serve as a photo intelligence center. Specialists wearing white gloves bend over light tables and peer through loupes to examine miles of black-and-white film as it rolls by. Most of the film is a dead gray wash -- desert sand -- but occasionally a white speck or a cluster of dark dots appears.

In one picture that a reporter got a close look at, three dark half-moons turned out to be revetments for mobile artillery, but with no guns visible inside. Captain Barclay Trehal claims that the 50 specialists he bosses can distinguish live and dead aircraft, Scud missile launchers, vehicles and entrenchments -- but not soldiers, who are too small to be seen. Their presence has to be inferred from concentrations of vehicles and equipment. Their numbers can only be guessed at. How much damage they may suffer from bomb hits is a more speculative judgment still.

That could become crucial in the next few weeks. One of the top-priority U.S. targets is the Republican Guards, Saddam's crack troops, who form a mobile reserve to be thrown into the eventual land battle for Kuwait at the most critical points. A high British officer says the allies will not launch the climactic ground offensive until at least 30%, and preferably 50%, of the Guards' fighting power is destroyed from the air. But how will they know when that point is reached? Washington officials admit they are having trouble gauging how much damage bombing is doing to the widely dispersed and well-dug- in Guards.

Bush lieutenants admit to two other mild disappointments. Scud missile launchers in Iraq have taken a longer time to find and destroy than expected. General Schwarzkopf reported that 35 Scuds were lobbed against Israel or Saudi Arabia in the first seven days of the war, only 18 in the second seven days. And in the first half of the war's third week only four launchings were recorded: three warheads fell on or near the Israeli-occupied West Bank, causing no reported casualties, and another aimed at Riyadh was destroyed by a Patriot missile. But 1,500 sorties have been directed against Scuds, the most against any single type of target, and that has delayed and lessened the assault against such other vital targets as supply lines and the Republican Guards. Also, Iraq has proved more adept than expected at repairing runways, roads, radar and certain communications lines, forcing allied planes to hit some of those installations again and again.

Schwarzkopf reeled off impressive figures last week: 33 of 36 bridges hit on the supply lines between Iraq and Kuwait; truck traffic on the main Baghdad- to-Kuwait City road reduced to 10% of normal. But one or two of his claims might raise a skeptical eyebrow. The number of sorties flown against bridges divided by the number of bridges hit works out to almost 24 sorties per damaged bridge, which seems to indicate that a lot of "precision-guided" bombs and missiles are missing. Again, Schwarzkopf's estimate that the quantity of supplies reaching the Iraqi troops in Kuwait has dropped from 20,000 tons a day to a mere 2,000 assumes that damage on secondary roads has been as severe as on the main highway to Baghdad. Maybe, but no proof has been given. In general, however, there is no reason to doubt the picture of an awesome battering that eventually must seriously weaken Saddam's ability to withstand a ground attack.

What is more, Bush's advisers claim that the happy surprises in the air war outweigh the disturbing ones. The most heartening surprise is that losses have been so low. White House officials had braced themselves for the destruction of 100 or more American planes in the first few days: the actual figure lost in combat through the first 17 days was 15, plus seven allied craft. The principal reason, according to Schwarzkopf, is that the allies have so seriously crippled the Iraqi air-defense system that Baghdad has given up all attempts to exercise central control: every antiaircraft and missile battery is on its own trying to track and intercept allied raiders. Then there is the virtual disappearance of the Iraqi air force: scores of its planes destroyed on the ground or in the air; hundreds more hiding in shelters and rarely taking off; another 100 or so of the best planes flown to Iran.

What they are doing there is still a mystery. At one end of the speculative spectrum is the theory that at least some fled after the failure of an Iraqi air force coup to overthrow Saddam; at the opposite end is the possibility that Saddam has swung a deal to have Iran keep them safe for a while, then return them to him later in the war. The prevailing idea is that Saddam intends to stash them away for use by a postwar Iraqi regime that he thinks he will still head. This is backed up by repeated Iranian assurances that both planes and pilots will be interned until the end of the war. That would be fine with the U.S. As long as the planes are in Iran, they are of no use to Saddam, and if he tries to bring them back, American commanders are convinced they can shoot them down.

Iran was at the center of another mystery last week. What was Francois Scheer, general secretary of the French Foreign Ministry, doing in Tehran at the same time as Saadoun Hammadi, Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister, along with veteran would-be peacemakers from Algeria and Yemen? Cooking up some sort of compromise settlement, as the British suspected and his Iranian hosts mischievously hinted? Certainly not, huffed a spokesman in Paris; Scheer was only pursuing a variety of bilateral French-Iranian matters.

On the whole, the anti-Saddam coalition seemed to draw closer together last week. French Defense Minister Jean-Pierre Chevenement had put himself in an impossible position, managing his government's participation in a war he stubbornly opposed; he resigned and was succeeded by Pierre Joxe, a loyal follower of President Francois Mitterrand. The U.S. won permission to fly B-52 bombers out of bases in Britain and Spain on missions to the gulf. That will allow it to attack the Republican Guards with more of the giant planes than can be accommodated at bases in Saudi Arabia and the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. The agreement was no surprise in the case of loyal ally Britain, but a very considerable surprise on the part of the formerly aloof government in Madrid. France agreed to allow the B-52s to fly over its territory. Being France, however, it attached conditions -- among them that the B-52s not carry nuclear bombs.

The biggest political threat to the coalition seemed to be that the Soviet Union might throw its weight behind various cease-fire proposals kicking around the United Nations. That might be a way of delivering an implicit message to the U.S.: If you make trouble for us in the Baltics, we'll make trouble for you in the gulf.

Secretary of State James Baker defused that threat, but at some political cost. He and Soviet Foreign Minister Alexander Bessmertnykh, visiting in Washington, agreed to a statement recommitting the U.S.S.R. to the proposition that Iraq must get out of Kuwait, period.

But the statement also seemed to imply a new U.S. willingness to go along with a cease-fire offer to Saddam, albeit on tough terms, and a greater degree of linkage between an end to the fighting and a postwar push for an Arab- Israeli settlement. Baker apparently thought the language was so innocuous that it would hardly be noticed. But peace advocates were so delighted and hard-liners so incensed that the White House felt obliged to state that there had been no change in policy.

On what terms the U.S. might end the fighting is a question that will have to be faced sooner or later. But for the moment it is academic. All the signals from Saddam indicate that his troops will stay in Kuwait until they are blasted out. The blasting so far is proceeding more or less as planned. But it has some way to go, and Saddam may have more surprises to spring before the war is over.

With reporting by William Dowell/Dhahran, Dan Goodgame/Washington and Dick Thompson/Northeast Saudi Arabia