Yet it was cities like this that made the modern world unconquerable. The 1st USMC division had about 23,000 troops, which included a good number of “Pogue” support troops. That meant there were over 100 Iraqi citizens for every Marine in Basrah, perhaps 200 for each actual combat Marine in the division. Occupying and attempting to control such a city was a daunting, if not impossible, task. Yet at that time, the Coalition planners were thinking that they could simply defeat the Iraqi Army in the south and then gain the good will of a liberated local population.
It would not happen that way.
The Iraqis planned to fight forward of the city to protect the oil fields, but if beaten, they intended to fall back into the concrete maze of Basrah, joined by thousands of Iranians that were even now making their way to the city, both regular troops and Revolutionary Guard units. There they would find a teeming host of young men of military age, and the process of radicalizing them to resist the Western Infidels would begin in earnest.
The odd thing about oil infrastructure was that you couldn’t really occupy and defend it militarily. You could do this to guard against small threats or planned terrorist acts, but not against a big conventional military force. Defending on or too near these fragile and volatile facilities would only lead to their destruction, and so the strategy was to yield the ground if the line could not be held forward of the fields. Then you would wait out the resolution of the conflict to see who could claim the prizes in the end. Basrah was where the Iraqis and Iranians would be waiting….
The Marines were ready.
They had already broken the back of the Iraqi defense in Saudi Arabia, sent them retreating north, then outmaneuvered them with the help of 82nd Airborne, and cut their numbers in half in a great pocket. The road ahead was just what was left, and they were going to get some more. While the Iraqi Army remained in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, they were in a position that was tailor made for an envelopment to the West. Given the extreme mobility of the US forces, the result was virtually inevitable. The Iraqis thought they could run, but they could simply not run and gun with the USMC, America’s premier shock troops. Nothing that was so boldly taken in the Iraqi Operation Desert Sword would be kept for long. By the 21st of January, the Coalition had liberated the Bahra, Burgan and Ratqa Oil Fields in Kuwait, and they were about to go after the Sabiryah Fields next.
“Panther, this is Wildfire. Sitrep. Over.”
“Roger Wildfire. We have movement to the northwest on both highways. Objective J-7 is occupied as well. It’s getting lonesome out here. Panther, over.”
“Roger Panther. Eagle wants you on J-7 immediately. Falcon will assist from the south. Over.”
Panther and Falcon were the 1st and 2nd BCTs of the 82nd Airborne, out on a wide envelopment mission to get the airfield at Jalibah, (J-7), and establish a blocking position astride Highways 1 and 8 connecting Baghdad with Basrah. SOUTHCOM did not want any more Iraqi reserve forces moving south into the Basrah sector as the Marines bulled their way into the port of Umm Qasr, reaching the northern border of Kuwait just before dawn on the 21st. Kuwait was officially liberated, with all hostile forces ejected and the country back in the hands of the Kuwaiti Royal Family by 06:00.
The Iranian troops were still just across that frontier, and four Iraqi Motor Rifle Brigades extended the front along the southern edge of the Rumailah Oil Fields, and on out into the desert, where fixed defensive positions had been prepared before the war. With those two BCT’s of the 82nd on Objective J-7, everything in the south was officially cut off from the north, and the war now had its two distinct theaters.
The movement to the north on Highways 1 and 8 were the 26th and 27th Iraqi Motor Rifle Brigades, the forces that had been way out on a limb near Halfar in Saudi Arabia for the entire war. They were the troops that Lieutenant Michael Ives and Sergeant James Stoker had first eyeballed crossing the Saudi border in the wee early hours of the 25th of November, almost two months earlier. That had been all the time that Qusay Hussein’s war had bought him in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Just shy of 60 days later, all his troops were back on home turf, and those two brigades were among the last to reach populated areas of Iraq again following a long march through the emptiness of the desert.
After resting briefly near Nasiriyah, they had been ordered south to join the Sibay MR Brigade, posted near the airfield they had just lost to the 82nd Airborne. A little north of their position at Nasiriyah, two more territorial brigades were mustering near that city. So even with two BCT’s out on that flank, the 82nd was still in Bad Guy territory, with elements of five Iraqi Brigades withing striking distance of their position near Jalibah Airfield. They were a thorn in the Iraqis’ side there, and a battle was slowly brewing in that sector.
That morning, the men of the 82nd watched and waited for trouble, but it never came. In taking the airfield, they had surrounded and destroyed one battalion of the Sibay MR Brigade. The remaining two did not stick around, retreating east along Highway-8 to man prepared positions elsewhere.
Those vast fields extended from the Kuwaiti border as far north as Al Qurna, and they had been producing 1.4 million barrels of oil per day before the war, with almost all of that running southeast through pipelines to the oil terminal port of Fao. From there the tankers would take it all out through the Persian Gulf to destinations all over the world, though the Chinese had drawn heavily on that supply, until the war stopped virtually all tanker traffic to and from the Gulf.
But there in the south of Iraq, the world’s 2nd, 3rd and 4th largest oil fields, West Qurna, Majnoon, and Rumailah, and of these only the latter was now in full production. The other two sat as vast untapped reserves, with only modest production underway in this history, but they were the fields that would carry much of the weight of the world’s energy needs to the year 2050. China had bet heavily on them, and now it was seeing that bet in danger of being lost.
Qusay Hussein and his brother might have good reason to complain now. They had risked a great deal to make a bold play for control of the world’s greatest oil prize, Ghawar, along with the fields in Kuwait, but now all of that had been for naught. The question now was whether or not Iraq could defend these tremendous field assets in the south, and the Chinese were nowhere to be seen.
Geography was the principle reason. In our history, there is no direct rail line from China to Pakistan. The formidable obstacle of high rugged mountains made this near impossible. But China had invested heavily in a major pipeline project through Kazakhstan and also in the Central Asia-China pipeline through Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. These steel arteries were reaching to tap the new oil fields of the Caspian Basin, and with them in this history, China financed and built railways into those regions as well.
It was another case of an apparent economic infrastructure project that would now have a secondary role in time of war. China could not send troops to Pakistan by rail easily, or at all, but it could send them to Iran. In this history, a 425 mile rail connection between Kashgar in China and Dushanbe in Tajikistan had been completed by the year 2020, and from there, existing lines reached through Turkmenistan into Iran. There the rails ran from Mashad to Tehran, and then south through Arak, Khorramabad, Dezful, and on to Avhaz, which was just 65 miles north of Basrah.
That was what was now on the table in Beijing as the Chinese General Staff saw the inevitable collapse of the Iraqi Army as only a matter of time. With the Siberian front settled down to a glare across the newly established DMZ, the General Staff was asked to consider the moment of the Chinese 13th Army to Iran.