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| Axis of Evil |
| Northern front to be key part of invasion |
| 2002-12-23 |
| More secret war plans hit the papers, this in the Gulf News. The Pentagon is drawing up plans to helicopter thousands of U.S. soldiers into Iraq from Turkey in the early days of an invasion, establishing a northern front that war planners increasingly see as a key part of any U.S. military action against Saddam Hussain's regime. Designed partly to address Turkish opposition to basing large numbers of U.S. troops on its soil, the plans call for ferrying soldiers into Turkish bases and transferring them quickly to helicopters that would deposit them in northern Iraq, senior defence officials said. There they would secure key oil fields and stabilise provinces already controlled by ethnic Kurds, who oppose the Iraqi president's regime. The still-developing plans for a northern front would use Turkish bases as staging areas for lightly equipped, U.S. Army airborne units. The troops - most likely elements of the Army's V Corps, based in Germany, and the 101st Airborne Division, based at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky - would be flown into Turkey a few thousand at a time, only long enough to be shuttled onto combat helicopters for deployment into Iraq. An assault on Iraq from the north, in addition to much larger invasions planned from the west and the south, "will scare the bejesus out of Saddam,'' one military officer said, and force him to devote troops and resources to repelling U.S. advances on several fronts. The plans cannot be successful without the approval of Turkish officials, who have been the focus of intense U.S. diplomatic efforts in recent weeks. The Turks, the sole Muslim member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, have permitted small numbers of U.S. special forces soldiers to move clandestinely into the Kurdish regions of northern Iraq, but don't want a huge American military presence in their country. For months now the Pentagon has been building up forces in the Arabian Gulf nations to Iraq's south capable of mounting a major invasion of Iraq by land, sea and air. Such an invasion, including forces that would move into Iraq from Saudi Arabia to the south and west, could involve more than 100,000 U.S. troops. About 50,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines already are in the Gulf, with heavy armor and other equipment flowing in. The ability to fly warplanes out of Turkey has long been seen as essential in any campaign against Iraq. The bases are modern facilities built and outfitted to fulfill Turkey's obligations as a member of Nato, which makes them compatible with U.S. planes and far superior to many other air bases in the region. The country played a key role in the 1991 Gulf War when it opened its bases to U.S. military aircraft staging bombing raids against Iraqi targets. The decision to allow the American airstrikes from its territory was made at the last minute. But until recently, the United States has developed its plans largely without counting on using Turkey as a major staging area for American ground troops, sensitive to the delicate economic and political situation in that country and to its worries that territorial ambitions of Kurds in Iraq might spread to its own Kurdish minority. That changed this month, when U.S. Deputy Defence Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz flew to Turkey to press the government there to provide more support for the U.S. plan. "We're quite comfortable with what we can do from the south'' of Iraq, Wolfowitz said after meeting with Turkish officials in Ankara, the capital. "Obviously, if we are going to have significant ground forces in the north, this is the country they have to come through. There is no other option.''Senior U.S. officials said that although a campaign against Saddam's regime can succeed militarily without Turkey's involvement, the country's support is key to "keeping it short, keeping it fierce, keeping the flow of refugees small.'' Might be a false story, but tactically sound |
| Posted by:Steve |