LONDON, April 2 (UPI) -- The British are waiting almost with baited breath for the other shoe to drop in what some are already billing the final battle for Baghdad.
With the most forward U.S. troops reported to be just 19 miles from central Baghdad the impression being generated by news reports and military experts is that something major is likely to happen in the next 24 to 48 hours. The problem is no one appears to know if it will be good or bad.
The big, sprawling city appears to be wide open. British reporters who have managed to get out of their carefully watched hotel say there are no signs of major military preparations, no tanks or artillery guns on the streets, no checkpoints. Six-lane highways apparently present no obstructions to U.S. tanks to race into the city center.
Ominously, however, small groups of men, both in uniform and in civilian clothes, reportedly stand at almost every street corner and empty shop, at slit trenches by the side of the road, most of the men carrying AK-47 rifles or rocket-propelled grenade launchers. It is suggested that tanks may lie in wait inside shop fronts.
With reports all day that the advancing U.S. forces have found surprisingly light resistance from the two big Republic Guard divisions opposing them at Karbala and Hindiya, there are suggestions that somehow many of the tanks, rocket launchers and troops of the Medina and Nebuchadnezzar Divisions have already escaped back into Baghdad.
U.S. Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks told a news conference at Central Command headquarters in Qatar that at Al Kut -- which history-minded Britons remember as the site of a major British defeat of Turkish forces in 1915 -- the Baghdad Republican Guard Division was "destroyed" as U.S. Marines slammed into it. He declined to be more specific, except to say it was no longer functioning.
British military sources say it was already the weakest of the six Republic Guard divisions around Baghdad and was the most likely to have collapsed first.
Two 15,000-pound "Daisy Cutter" bombs designed to flatten a huge area may well have accounted for many troops of that division on Wednesday, and reports of B-52s dropping scores of cluster bombs on an Iraqi troop convoy may well have taken care of many others.
But there is concern that much of the 'heavy fighting' across the front stated by U.S. military spokesman may be against decoy Iraqi gun sites and dug-in tanks. "There is some mystery," said British Broadcast Corp reporter Gavin Hewitt in Iraq, "of whether the Medina Division is actually there, or in Baghdad or Karbala."
In an article for The Times, former U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark, who led NATO forces during the Kosovo campaign in 1999, said the experience of Kosovo should be cautionary.
"Day after day in the late spring of 1999, we continued to roll up impressive totals of tanks, armored vehicles and artillery and mortars destroyed," he wrote. "Still, much of the (Serb) force simply road-marched out of Kosovo, relatively intact, at the end of the campaign ... Post-conflict investigation on the ground in Kosovo found much less evidence of the destruction than we expected."
Clark said the Iraq situation should be clearer, since the allies in Kosovo depended heavily on air observation, and this time there are land forces and Special Forces to back that up.
There are fears, however, that as Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has often declared, the final battle will be fought and won in the cities.
U.S. Central Command head Gen. Tommy Franks and his staff are certain to be aware of the dangers, and indicate they are refusing to be drawn to them. Even British Prime Minster Tony Blair, when asked about reports of Saddam's forces shooting from inside the Ali Mosque at Karbala, said: "we are doing everything we can to protect these holy sites which are so important to the Iraqi people."
There are some British suspicions that Saddam's leadership is in bigger trouble than has so far been publicly indicated -- Saddam's failure Tuesday to read his own statement urging jihad against the British and Americans, for instance, or more recently reports of 'considerable' small arms fire near the center of Baghdad.
According to the London Evening Standard a "senior U.S. source" said only, "Keep watching the television," when asked if U.S. troops would enter Baghdad on Wednesday night.
British military sources have told United Press International that Franks' staff have been closely watching the British plan for Basra, which involves careful probing and patrolling, seeking out the Baathist holdouts and foci of Saddam's power, and taking their time while steadily building up civilian confidence on the outskirts.
The sources said they would not be surprised if U.S. special operations forces conduct lightning raids into Baghdad over the next few days and weeks, using helicopters and armored equipment in much better ways than the Rangers did in Mogadishu in 1993.
Meanwhile, the rescue of U.S. Pfc. Jessica Lynch was greeted with delight by the British media, but BBC-TV said the press announcements were "intricately choreographed," involving an unusual middle of the night briefing at Central Command "in order to make the evening news on the East Coast," with the video of her rescue arranged to arrive in time for the breakfast TV shows.
The Pentagon, it is noted in London, needed a good story to tell after a week of bad ones.
