March 30, 2003	Sunday	Muharram 26, 1424

LONDON: Senior American and British military commanders were on Friday night accepting the unwelcome reality that the strategy of a quick war leading to an early collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime has failed.

As the US nearly doubled the strength of its force by flying in a further 120,000 troops — not expected to be deployed in Iraq until the end of April — and subjecting Baghdad to the heaviest bombing for several days, British commanders admitted that their troops were nowhere near to controlling Basra, the second largest city.

Basra was “clearly nowhere near yet in our hands”, a British military spokesman, Colonel Chris Vernon, said. He admitted that the resolve and number of irregular Iraqi forces in the city were greater than anticipated.

General William Wallace, the US army’s senior commander in Iraq, said unexpected tactics by Iraqi fighters, and the US army’s stretched supply lines, were slowing down the campaign.

“The enemy we’re fighting is different from the one we’d wargamed against,” he told the Washington Post and New York Times.

General Sir Mike Jackson, the head of Britain’s army, declined to predict how long the war would last. He said media references to coalition troops being “bogged down” were “tendentious”. Iraqi forces in southern Iraq were “pinned down”, he insisted.

But he too acknowledged that the invading troops had not seen “displays of a welcoming population”. By his side at a UK Ministry of Defence press conference in London, Adam Ingram, the UK armed forces minister, said coalition troops “must convince Iraqis of their good intentions”.

In one of the areas where resistance has been unexpectedly tough, US marines and Iraqi forces exchanged tank and artillery fire in the strategic southern city of Nassiriya. Several buildings, including the power plant, were ablaze.

In Baghdad, the biggest bombs so far were dropped on the Iraqi capital. Two “bunker busters” struck a communications tower.

In the south of the country, British military officials said Iraqi forces were shooting at about 2,000 civilians trying to flee the fighting and a humanitarian crisis in the besieged city of Basra.

The major objective in the north was to seize the valuable oilfields near the city of Kirkuk, about 80 miles from an American paratroopers’ drop on Thursday. “Kirkuk is key,” said Major Mike Hastings of the US army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade. “The Iraqis want it, the Kurds want it, the Turks want it.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.