ABRIL, Northern Iraq, 5 March 2003 — The failure of the US to persuade Turkey to allow its bases to be used by American troops for an attack on Iraq has vastly complicated US military plans to create a northern front against Saddam Hussein.
The US had hoped to attack Iraq from both north and south. Suddenly the very existence of the northern pincer is in doubt. Some 62,000 US soldiers and 310 military aircraft were to be deployed in Turkey enabling the US Army’s 4th Infantry Division to push south. The two key prizes in the great flat plain stretching north from Baghdad are the cities of Mosul and Kirkuk. The capture of Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, would be a serious blow to the Iraqi government because it is the home of many army officers and officials. Kirkuk is if anything more essential. The province is a major producer of oil. The US fears that if its attack is delayed Saddam might use the time to blow up the oil fields, as he did in Kuwait in 1991, though he has promised not to.
Securing Kirkuk swiftly has also been considered important by US policy makers because of its political significance. The Kurds consider Kirkuk to be a Kurdish city from which they have been ethnically cleansed for decades under Saddam’s campaign. Turkey has said it will invade if the Kurds attack it.
Now all this is in doubt. The US has been claiming that it can simply redeploy its troops destined for the north to the southern front but this would allow Saddam Hussein to withdraw troops from around Kirkuk and Mosul. A central US purpose was to pin these Iraqi soldiers down.
The Iraqi Army has 12 divisions from the 5th and 1st Army corps, each with five regular divisions, defending the two northern cities. Each is supplemented with one Republican Guard division and local militia called the Al-Quds Army, though this appears to be primarily designed to quell local dissent. Depending on how far these divisions are up to strength, the Iraqi leader has at least 120,000 regular soldiers, and possibly as many as 180,000 in the north, according to Karim Sinjari, the Kurdish interior minister based in Arbil.
Does the US have an alternative strategy to take northern Iraq if Turkey does not buckle under pressure for the US to use its bases? For a full deployment these facilities are essential. But the US could base smaller and lighter forces in Iraqi Kurdistan using local air fields.
