It wasn’t the kind of fighting they were expecting, and it has affected morale.”Another journalist reported the frustration of US Marines that “every time they engage Iraqi units they often find these Iraqi units just change into civilian clothes and then melt away. And then next thing they know [they] are being hit from behind by .. guerrilla fighters.”These are not isolated incidents. In comments said to have caused unease in the Pentagon, the US Army’s senior ground commander in Iraq, General William Wallace, told The Washington Post: “The enemy we’re fighting is different from the one we’d war-gamed against. We knew they were there [the paramilitaries] but we didn’t know they would fight like this.” The general warned that long supply lines and Iraqi guerrilla-style tactics had reduced the chances of the swift war that military planners had hoped for.In response, Pentagon officials announced that 120,000 reinforcements are being summoned to assist the 90,000 US-led troops now inside Iraq. But they insisted the deployments – which will take place “over the next few weeks” – have been planned for some time, many of them having originally been earmarked for an assault from the north through Turkey, until the anti-war Turkish parliament scuppered the plan.The Iraqi air base at Talil, outside Nasiriyah, which was captured in the first 36 hours of the campaign, was opened after work on the runway to take large US transport planes. The first landed in what will be a significant help to the logistic chain to get fuel, food and ammunition to troops nearer Baghdad. The main task of the new troops will be to defend that supply chain.But further evidence of the need for the military rethink came yesterday in Basra.

Initial hopes of Allied troops being met by crowds of liberated cheering Iraqis have now evaporated. The problem does not necessarily lie in the disposition of the ordinary people – that will remain unknown until the apparatus of Saddam’s state repression has been lifted. What is hampering things is the extent to which the Baath party apparatus is still effectively in place.Some 2,000 civilians tried to break out of Basra, to flee through Allied lines. About half of them made it across a bridge out of the strategic town.

But then Iraqi militia opened fire using machine-guns and mortars to force them back into the city. The Black Watch battalion, part of the British force which has been encircling Basra for five days, fired on the militia. Attempts to get British military ambulances through to injured civilians were unsuccessful. Failed attempts like this do not augur well for the possibility of uprisings against President Saddam by ordinary Iraqis elsewhere, particularly not in Baghdad where his systems of internal control are strongest.