Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [250]
There was less fighting in the south than had been expected. Many of Saddam’s conscript forces, fearing the fate they would meet against coalition armor and airpower, deserted their positions, removed their uniforms, and fled to their homes.
During the first nights of the campaign, some American special operations commandos dropped into northern Iraq while others stalked the western deserts. As in Afghanistan, they used night vision and handheld laser devices to identify Saddam’s forces, which American aircraft proceeded to attack with pinpoint accuracy.
Coalition forces met their first sustained challenge when they advanced on the city of Nasiriyah, a key strategic target because it commanded crossings over the Euphrates River. Given the city’s importance, American forces expected resistance from the Iraqi army. Instead, the enemy took the form of hundreds of Fedayeen irregular forces that had arrived in trucks, buses, and taxis. Eleven U.S. troops were killed in the fighting. A nineteen-year-old private named Jessica Lynch was captured by the enemy and extravagant reports about her resistance to capture flooded the media.* In hindsight, the real story out of Nasiriyah was the role of the Fedayeen Saddam and the magnitude of the threat they posed. Our intelligence community had not anticipated the kind of enemy that coalition forces eventually faced in Iraq—or the kind of irregular operations by Saddam’s paramilitary forces that foreshadowed the insurgency. Not until our forces were on the ground did we learn the extent to which the Fedayeen Saddam had stockpiled weapons and ammunition in nearly every city, town, and village in the country to help quell any uprising against Saddam. The Fedayeen were trained in counterinsurgency and capable of promptly and ruthlessly suppressing revolts against him.
The Fedayeen soon emerged as the core of an irregular enemy that attracted hundreds, and eventually thousands, of foreign fighters from across the Muslim world looking to fight the West. American forces routinely found a variety of foreign passports on the bodies of enemies they captured or killed in battle. Most of the passports documented that their bearers had crossed into Iraq from Syria. These non-Iraqi jihadists tended to be poorly armed with Kalashnikov rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, but they had the ability to blend in well with the Iraqi civilian population, and they fought with the fervor of fanatics.
As it turned out, weeks before the war began, Saddam’s ministry of defense had made efforts to integrate Arab jihadists into Iraqi training camps.3 Captured documents describe legions of Muslim fighters from Syria, Libya, Bulgaria, Turkey, Tunisia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, and the Palestinian territories.4 One, dated March 27, 2003, describes an Iraqi intelligence official’s conversation with the leader of Hamas in Gaza in which “[h]e requested us [the Iraqi government] to open the checkpoints at the border to let the volunteer fighters participate in the war.”5 The report continued, “Hamas is willing to carry out demonstrations and suicide attacks to support Iraq.” Captured log records also documented the steady stream of foreign fighters into Iraq during this period.6 Saddam ordered that Arab Fedayeen volunteers receive the same salaries and benefits as Iraq’s Special Forces.7
It soon became clear that the gaps in our intelligence about the Fedayeen Saddam were signs of a broader problem. For years there had been an overreliance on reconnaissance from aircraft and satellites rather than on-the-ground human intelligence. The problem was not endemic only to the CIA. Intelligence agencies within the Defense Department, such as the Defense Intelligence Agency, also failed to assess correctly the threat posed by the Fedayeen. While the attraction of foreign jihadists to the conflict in Iraq was possible given their hatred of America, the fact is that