Iraqis burn oil trenches to slow U.S. advance

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/03/2003 (8522 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BAGHDAD, Iraq — A half dozen Iraqi men stood mesmerized on the curb of Hunting Club Street, their eyes glued on the horizon like they were watching an angry storm front march across the sky above a broad Midwestern plain.

Instead, they saw a vision of Hell.

Baghdad was encircled by up to twenty soaring pillars of inky black smoke billowing from trenches of burning oil. After a night of devastating attacks and with Iraqi air defenses appearing increasingly porous, Saddam Hussein’s regime turned for a deterrent to one commodity Iraq has plenty of: oil.

But as smoke drifted through the skies above Baghdad and a premature darkness enveloped this sprawling city, there was no evidence that the columns of thick smoke had disrupted the U.S.-led coalition’s arsenal of laser-guided bombs and missiles.

Air strikes continued intermittently all day in the first daylight raids of the campaign to topple Saddam from power. But air-raid sirens seldom blared before 2,000-pound “bunker-buster” bombs, striking their targets, echoed with a resounding thud across the city.

Gazing at the towering plumes of smoke, Abdul Razak and his five neighbors in Baghdad?s Mansour district just shook their heads in dismay. Oil was always a symbol of Iraq’s strength. Now, ironically, it was a sign of its increasing desperation and weakness, as U.S. and British warplanes and cruise missiles appeared to be hammering Iraqi targets at will.

“We’ll take care of our families and our homes. But did you hear those missiles last night? Did you hear those bombs? What can burning oil do?” asked the 55-year-old Razak.

The war opened in Baghdad on Thursday with a failed attempt to kill Saddam by bombing a private residence where he is thought to have been holed up with his top leadership. It continued later that day with several brief air strikes that, while damaging, had left many war-weary Baghdadis confident the morning after that they would prevail.

But on Friday night, the United States unleashed its military might with more than two hours of deafening bombardment that sent flames mushrooming into the air and lit the sky above the Iraqi capital. Bombs struck southern Baghdad again before dawn on Saturday, jolting Baghdadis from their beds.

The raids underscored the coalition’s air superiority, dramatically in the case of Saddam’s gaudy palace in the Yarmouk district, one of at least a dozen Zanadus the Iraqi leader has in Baghdad.

The missile entered the palace’s upper-floor portico and ignited a fire that gutted the shrine to Saddam’s power and vanity. On Saturday morning, twisted and charred metal jutted from windows of the colonnaded building, though the four, 20-foot-high bronze busts of the Iraqi leader atop the residence were still intact.

Like the acrid smoke that settled on Baghdad this evening, Friday night’s dramatic attacks gave some Iraqis the first whiff of the regime’s weakness by casting doubt on the semi-official line that Iraqis could withstand anything because under Saddam they had suffered everything, including two devastating wars and a dozen years of U.N.-imposed economic sanctions.

“This is real war now. There’s no more joking,” said one middle-aged Iraqi man, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear for his safety. “Iraqis thought they had seen everything, but the 1991 (Gulf) war was a laugh compared to this.”

While some Iraqis said they had prayed all night in the darkness of their homes, the man said he had spent the night trying in vain to calm his terrified wife and three children. “My son kept saying, ‘Make it stop, Papa!’ but what can I do? Nothing.”

Not surprisingly, Iraqi authorities brushed off the latest battlefield setbacks. With a bravado that was extraordinary even by official Iraqi standards, Abdel Razak Hashimi on Saturday goaded coalition forces to continue their march across southern Iraq.

“It’s flat and there’s nothing but desert. Let them move! Let them move! They will never achieve their objective,” said Hashimi, a senior adviser to the Iraqi president.

By resorting to oil-burning, however, the Iraqis appeared desperate for any measure that might slow the American-led onslaught and stem the battering the Iraqi capital was receiving from the air.

Iraq’s military learned the tactic from its Serb counterpart, with whom they have had long ties. Belgrade believed that the large amount of smoke particulates in the air during the NATO-led war against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic several years ago had reduced the effectiveness of America’s high-tech weaponry by diffusing the laser beams often used to guide it.

Last month, authorities set alight oil in a trench on the outskirts of Baghdad to determine how long it would burn. On Saturday, they unleashed the fires and smoke in hopes they could succeed where antiaircraft artillery had so far failed.