AN ALLIED AIR BASE IN KUWAIT, 25 March 2003 — At the nightly briefing here, Col. Jon Miclot, the Marines’ aviation wing, MAW, operations officer, on Sunday night said that the Iraqi soldiers’ use of guerrilla tactics — posing as farmers, for instance, and approaching US forces as though they were civilians, “has proved to be quite a challenge.”
“When they show up in civilian clothes and civilian vehicles, we haven’t been treating them as enemies, which has caused us real problems,” he said. “The time needed to figure out who these guys were forced us to deal with an ambiguous situation,” he added.
Speaking about the firefight with the disguised Iraqi soldiers, Miclot said: “My understanding is that they were pretty serious and basically willing to commit suicide. There are also large numbers of Iraqi people who want freedom,” he said, “but there are still pockets of resistance.”
“We sure aren’t walking through the friendly villages of France,” he said, in reference to the US liberation forces in France at the end of World War II.
“They are employing guerrilla tactics, and we have to adapt to that,” Miclot said. “Many Iraqis were been born and raised under this regime, so it’s hard for them to understand what a different Iraq could be.”
In the air, meanwhile, the Marines’ aviation sorties continue 24 hours a day. Commenting on the high amount of US and British aircraft flying into Iraqi territory, he hinted that Col. Ed Hackett, a pilot and spokesman for the Wing, said the airspace was quite busy.
“We have a very strict routine and overlapping controls, and are very strict with our traffic control,” he said. It’s thorough and can be complex at times because of the limited altitude.” He said that the pilots had planned a lot of preparation for this moment and had for months flown many practice runs. “The way it’s going now it seems to be fairly efficient,” he said.
