| ||
| ||
| ||
 |
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
British colonel: The battle for Basra continues
UMM QASR, Iraq (CNN) -- Some of the fiercest fighting of the war in Iraq in recent days has been in the southern Iraqi city of Basra. British troops are on the outskirts of the city and are pushing in. CNN Chief International Correspondent Christiane Amanpour spoke to a British army spokesman Monday about the fighting. AMANPOUR: Basra is a main objective, certainly, for the British in this region and also for the entire war aim. Basically, the British consolidated a position on the southeast of Basra, which means they are on the west and southeast side. In addition, British forces are being reinforced in many parts of the region, including north, to the north of the oil fields in Rumaylah. The first paratroop battalion was brought into the front earlier today. We have pictures of that, and were told about that from some of our military spokesmen here. As I say, the position southeast of Basra was consolidated over almost a 24-hour operation, and now they say they have got those positions. They took something like 200 Iraqi prisoners, and the battle for control of Basra continues, particularly the hearts-and-minds battle. The British, of course, have wanted to take in humanitarian aid there, but so far they have had to limit that to the areas and the towns and the villages they have already secured, and most of those lie south of Basra. We are going to turn now to Col. Chris Vernon, the senior military spokesman for the British forces, here to talk more about the strategic picture of what we're seeing. I want to ask you specifically about Basra. People are now beginning to say that perhaps it was a mistake not to immediately target the big urban areas, for instance, Basra and the others on the way to Baghdad, because that may have given the people sort of cause to wonder exactly what you were doing. And you know you hadn't controlled it and they didn't really know what your aim was. That's changed now, isn't it, because certain cities are now targets? VERNON: You have a fair point. The only urban area we wished to go into straightaway was Umm Qasr. The reason we wanted to fight for that was to bring in humanitarian aid, to achieve that staging court there. Any military person will tell you that fighting ... is, as we are seeing in Basra, difficult, and it's slow ... . We wish to defeat the Iraqi army out in the open desert. That gives us the space to then bring up our supplies, build up our lines of communication fairly securely and then switch to the urban areas. Now you could argue we could have gone the other way, but militarily we really had to have the open areas secure, which we have got before we turned our attention to Basra, and indeed, ultimately, to Baghdad. AMANPOUR: But the fact is that psychological warfare ... is a big part of this operation, and mostly now to try to convince the Iraqi people that you are here to stay, that you mean business this time, that the allied troops are serious this time, given their worries about what happened back in 1991. How are you going to achieve that now at this point? VERNON: A twin-track approach. We're targeting the Baath Party regime in Basra particularly ... and we're targeting the military they are controlling. We're also taking out the remnants of the Republican, not the Republican Guard, the Iraqi regular army who are operating around there. We are hitting at those. The other side of the approach is to very simply play hearts-and-minds operations with the local civilians, both in terms of information operations, cutting out their information flow, bringing in aid and just talking to them on the ground to try and engender in them a degree of confidence. So between the two tracks, what we are trying to do is drive a wedge between the control of the Baath Party officials and its militia and the people. AMANPOUR: Do you accept, though, what the people are saying, those we talk to quite regularly now, that until they know that you are here to stay, that you are not going to leave, that you are going to get rid of Saddam, which the stated objective is, they will not be out there welcoming you and you will not see this sort of hearts-and-minds battle won? VERNON: Certainly. It is not proving easy. There is very deep-seated fear indeed, given what happened to them in 1991, and we have just got to chip away at convincing them we are here to stay. I mean, if you were very well informed, the mere fact we have over 200,000 coalition troops here, and the United States is putting in more, is a clear indication of the results here to the end. They [the Iraqi people] have very little by which to make that judgment. So we have just got to keep going at it. AMANPOUR: You have basically torn down the TV antenna and you have taken down various radio frequencies to Basra. Do you think your message is getting through there? How do you measure and assess the effect you're having? VERNON: Not very easily at the moment, particularly in Basra, because we haven't got much in Basra. We are in and out. I can't say what we have got in there, but I have to say, it is not much, and what we have is still targeting the military and the Baath regime. And day on day, they become very much a minority with a much more normal town way of living. AMANPOUR: Col. Vernon, thank you very much indeed. As we say, that area southeast of Basra has been consolidated and secured, according to the British, and now really a chief aim is to start pushing out that humanitarian aid to all the communities. EDITOR'S NOTE: CNN's policy is to not report information that puts operational security at risk.
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
