Baghdad's underground city

[mr mahs]

Q&A: Baghdad's underground city

Our specia- ops boys will smoke this fucker out....

A tunnel complex has been discovered near the international airport outside Baghdad. With many more inside the capital, Richard Beeston, Diplomatic Editor, left, explains how their presence might affect the battle for Baghdad

What do we know of the tunnels discovered at the Baghdad airport today?

We don't know much detail about the tunnels discovered around the airport outside Baghdad. However, they may have been used by units of the Special Republican Guard, as there was a base for these elite troops found near the airport.

We are just scratching the surface of what we think is in Baghdad. We could be entering as critical phase of the campaign to expose and capture the tunnels and bunkers that Saddam Hussein has had constructed throughout Baghdad.

How might Baghdad's tunnel complex affect coalition strategy for the city?

The coalition commanders know that the war can be concluded quickly if they manage to capture or kill Saddam Hussein. The alternative could be a risky campaign involving the taking of the city street-by-street, which could be very costly in terms of civilian and coalition casualties.

The tunnels and bunkers will make the job of finding Saddam Hussein and his commanders very difficult. Since the 1970s he has spent millions of dollars constructing these complexes under presidential palaces and elsewhere. The coalition probably does not know where all of them are located.

How much do we know about Baghdad's bunkers and tunnels?

We do have some knowledge, gleaned mainly from the east European and Swiss companies that constructed them.

One structure we know of is under the main Presidential Palace, near the Tigris river in central Baghdad. It has been hit repeatedly since the first day of the war, when coalition air strikes acting on covert intelligence attempted to kill Saddam Hussein before hostilities had begun in earnest.

There is also a bunker under a guesthouse in the complex. The German firm that built it describes is as having three floors above ground amounting to 40,000 sq ft of floor space. The bunker complex beneath has 14 rooms, amounting to 14,000 sq ft. It has five-foot thick reinforced concrete walls and is 30 feet below ground.

There are several other bunkers scattered around the city and it is logical to assume that the coalition forces will not know the location of all of them. This is because their value diminishes once their location is known, as this turns them into places in which Saddam Hussein and his cohorts could be trapped. The bunker under the main Presidential Palace is thought to only have two exits.

What will coalition troops find if they capture a bunker?

George Galloway, the Labour MP, visited Saddam Hussein in one of his bunkers and describes being taken down in a high-speed lift, which caused his ears to pop as he descended. He described the interior as "elaborate and comfortable". The complexes will be well-equipped, but I think we can discard the more fanciful rumours about underground railway stations and the like.

Aside from their use as places for the Iraqi leadership to hide, they could also be used as places to store Saddam's chemical and biological weapons arsenal. When the United Nations weapons inspectors searched one of Saddam Hussein's presidential palaces last year they found empty chemical weapons shells.

What success have air strikes had against the bunkers?

The companies that built some of them have said that the US "bunker-buster" bombs will not be adequate to penetrate the bunkers' defences. This is because they have been designed to withstand nuclear attack. So it may be left to special forces or other ground troops have to find and capture the tunnels and bunkers.

However, the bunker under the main Presidential Palace was damaged during the1991 Gulf War. Whether the air strikes will be successful this time around is open to question. After the 1991 war reports emerged that suggested Saddam Hussein had been hiding in a residential area of Baghdad with only a few guards. Anonymity may prove a better defence against the coalition than nuclear-proof bunkers.