Thursday’s vote in the Turk­ish Par­lia­ment to allow U.S. planes access to Turkey’s air­space is on hold in the face of U.S. oppo­si­tion to Turkey send­ing troops into Iraqi Kur­dis­tan. [CNN] So, still no north­ern front.
And lis­ten­ing to CNN, MSNBC et al. would lead one to believe that vic­tory is at hand… That may be so but Kos has a good run-down on trou­bling reports from Reuters that things are not going as smoothly as the net­works and 24-hour news chan­nels might lead peo­ple to believe.
The tough­est bat­tles are yet to come. Strat­for lists the bridges across the Euphrates and the city of Basra as the real tests of Iraqi resis­tance. If the Iraqis don’t attempt to blow the bridge at al-Nasiriyah or offer only token resis­tance in Basra, “then the will of the Iraqi forces to fight has indeed col­lapsed.” [Strat­for] It is, as yet, too early to tell if that is the case.
Umm Qasr is still not 100 per­cent in the con­trol of the British [Reuters], but Ha’aretz and AP are report­ing that U.S. marines will soon be in con­trol.
[UPDATE: 12:26 PM EST, AP reports that U.S. Marines of the 15^th MEU, under British com­mand, have taken Umm Qasr. Con­trol allows access to a port for mat�riel and human­i­tar­ian sup­plies.]
At 1734 GMT, Al Jazeera reported bomb­ings in the north­ern oil city of Mosul.
At 1730 GMT, another Marine from the 1^st MEU was KIA, with another injured, U.S. defense offi­cials con­firmed. The Marines took fire dur­ing an oper­a­tion near Rumaila.
It seems “A-Day,” the start of “shock and awe” is begin­ning. And just as a side com­ment, I was lis­ten­ing to NPR this morn­ing and the announc­ers sounds almost dis­ap­pointed that they had not seen the “shock and awe” cam­paign yet. Per­haps I’m just being snippy, though.
If this is the begin­ning of shock and awe, it means the Pen­ta­gon has given up on the smaller hits designed to sow con­fu­sion in the Iraqi lead­er­ship and that the full scale bom­bard­ment has begun. The Pen­ta­gon was likely hop­ing to avoid this by punch­ing hard but back­ing off, and see­ing if they could either get the Iraqis to top­ple Sad­dam in a mat­ter of days or they were try­ing to smoke out the lead­er­ship.
Sat-phone and rugged lap­top en route. Will depart for Ankara next week, prob­a­bly Wednes­day or Thurs­day. Will try to hook up with other pho­tog­ra­pher who, like me, is look­ing to get into Iraqi Kur­dis­tan. Let’s hope all goes well…