July 5, 2003	Saturday	Jumadi-ul-Awwal 4,1424

LONDON: The land invasion of Iraq was “brought forward” by 14 days, a top British military officer revealed on Thursday. Air Chief Marshal Malcolm Pledger, who was responsible for deploying equipment for British forces to the Gulf, said the invasion of Iraq was advanced for “one major operational reason”. He declined to disclose the reason. But it is known that intelligence sources warned that Saddam Hussein was planning to set fire to the Rumaila oil fields in southern Iraq.

In an interview for the latest edition of the New Yorker magazine, General Tommy Franks, US commander of American and British forces in Iraq, said: “I made the decision to do the ground force early because our reconnaissance told us that we had the opportunity to get the southern oilfields intact”.

British defence sources said on Thursday that the planning assumption was that UK and US troops would not invade Iraq until early April. Gen Franks took the decision to move early before the strike on the Dora Farms compound south of Baghdad on the night of March 19/20. That strike was promoted by a CIA report that Saddam Hussein and his family were at the fortified compound.

Air Chief Marshal Pledger also said Switzerland had refused to supply grenades for British troops. In the event British soldiers did not need the batch blocked by the Swiss. He suggested that British military kit increasingly would be compatible with American equipment, a further indication that British troops would not fight wars without the US.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.