2003 Invasion of Iraq (Full Documentary) | Animated History

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It's April 10,

2003

. F-16 fighters come screaming to life on a nearby runway as C-130 cargo planes are loaded with supplies. A handful of soldiers play cards at a makeshift table trying to distract themselves from the anxiety in the air. They are americans. The British, Australians and Poles are exhausted from the long journey to the capital, but they know the fighting is not over yet when another plane leaves for Baghdad. The Australian announces the royal flush and leaves his cards. The others moan that he has won, but this is not normal. poker game on each card is printed the face of a high-ranking Iraqi official, they include general ministers and on the ace of spades president saddam hussein himself it is useful for soldiers to become familiar with these men early enough that they will be hunting them hello, I'm Griffin Johnson, the armchair historian, today we'll cover the

2003

invasion

of Iraq, sometimes called the second gulf war, in which hundreds of thousands of troops were committed to an

invasion

that ended with the deposition of a dictator while we It will cover some of the political background and context of this much discussed conflict.

This video will focus primarily on the combat maneuvers and objectives of the momentous invasion that sparked an eight-year occupation and insurgency, but first if you haven't had a chance to check it out. Watch our video on the first Iraq War here for a quick recap after it ended with the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait. American soldiers attempted to protect Kurdish and Shiite minorities in Iraq by imposing no-fly zones and launching airstrikes against strategic sites such as oil. camps and military bases, but after Saddam Hussein's repeated refusal to cooperate with UN weapons inspectors, the United States passed the Iraqi Liberation Act which officially solidified the goal of regime change in the country at the time, although this law was simply to provide millions of dollars to numerous opposition groups in the country in the hope of overthrowing Saddam's government, but it turned out that US interventions in the Middle East had already sown the seeds of a new conflict after the shocking events of President George W.

Bush, who stood before a wounded nation and officially declared that a new war was about to begin a war in conflicts other than the previous ones The United States would now use preemptive force against any government suspected of associating with organizations especially in accordance with what would be remembered as the Bush doctrine within weeks American forces had begun tearing apart Afghanistan in search of them. But when the infamous mastermind of the attacks disappeared, the United States turned its attention from Afghanistan to Iraq, where over the past 12 years Saddam Hussein had been increasingly perceived as a threat to American geostrategic interests in the region.

His refusal did not help this. To cooperate with the United Nations in late 2002, the United States began building a case against the Baathist government of Iraq and sought support from the UN Security Council. In addition to the alleged links to Al Qaeda, the Bush administration had a long list of justifications. of armed intervention, including the mistreatment of civilians and the aforementioned expulsion of UN weapons inspectors, perhaps anticipating how controversial these accusations would be in the future, many on the UN Security Council strongly opposed the proposed invasion, insisting that the United States seek a diplomatic solution, but even as the council debated that CIA teams were landing in Iraq to lay the groundwork for a

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-scale invasion the United States had already made up its mind Saddam's regime was doomed To move quickly members of the special activities division established contact with the Kurdish peshmerga who opposed Saddam so they began to identify key elements of the Iraqi leadership, this intelligence would be used to devastating effect in the early days of the conflict with surgical airstrikes that Many high-ranking officers were killed, and the Special Activities Division captured a chemical weapons factory, but despite Secretary of State Colin Powell's vivid descriptions of mobile weapons labs in the backs of trucks and train cars , the facility was the only one of its kind found during the entire Iraq War, unsurprisingly, these preemptive strikes did not help the United States' case before the UN, which continued to call for a reduction in tensions between key members of the NATO.

Countries such as France and Canada also strongly condemned the aggression of the United States, the opposition around the world organized the largest protest recorded in the history of humanity when in February 2003 more than 6 million people in 800 cities gathered to protest. against the war; However, in March 2003, the United States and the coalition of the willing, which included the United Kingdom, Poland, and Australia, among others, began massing troops in the region, unlike the war fought 12 years earlier. , would advance without UN approval. The invasion began slowly. The first phase consisted of numerous airstrikes and covert raids against targets within the country with varying degrees of success.

One of the first was the Al Qaeda battle on March 17, when British Special Air Service units attacked a suspected chemical weapons site located at a water treatment facility near the Syrian border, but Iraqi defenders put up a defense unexpectedly vigorous and the command team was forced to withdraw under heavy fire. Frustrated, they called an airstrike that leveled the entire facility and erased any potential evidence that chemical weapons were being stored at the facility. Another attack occurred. Two days later, in a community outside Baghdad called Dura Farms, believing that Saddam was visiting his children in the area, the United States saturated the area with 8,000 pounds of artillery and 40 Tomahawk cruise missiles in an attempt to wipe out the face of the Iraqi dictator. of the earth, however, each satellite-guided warhead missed its target and, as a result, more than a dozen civilians were injured and one died to complete the debacle.

It was later discovered that Saddam's last visit to the area had been almost a decade ago despite these problems. the main invasion was finally beginning based on the precedent set in the first gulf war and in Afghanistan. Most observers had expected a long period of aerial bombardment before any ground offensive; However, the coalition opted to launch a rapid air and ground campaign that would prevent most of it. urban areas and focus on decapitating the Iraqi government. This tactic later called shock and awe was chosen for two reasons: First, American leaders assumed that if the command structure was eliminated, organized resistance would disintegrate.

Second, the civilian population was expected to support the Americans as liberators. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was particularly optimistic about this, stating that there will be Iraqis who will offer not only to help us but also to liberate the country and the Iraqi people, as we will see that this was not entirely the case on the night. on March 19. Members of the 160th Airborne Division known as the Night Stalkers destroyed more than 70 Iraqi military posts along the southern and western borders with the path clear. Coalition forces advanced from Kuwait on two fronts, one heading north and one heading south, and a combined air and amphibious assault was also launched.

On the Alpha Peninsula on March 20 with the goal of securing the critical oil infrastructure located there, American, British and Polish commandos worked tirelessly to capture the offshore platforms before they could be sabotaged by the defenders despite significant resistance from the entrenched Iraqis supported by artillery fire. The teams were able to secure the peninsula after a grueling three-day battle. Their efforts likely averted a major ecological disaster and saved billions of dollars in equipment that Saddam would otherwise have destroyed in a small act of revenge. Unfortunately for the coalition, this would be the last good PR they would receive for quite some time, as we will see in part 2 now available, the war over Iraq was just beginning and even this initial taste of victory had been soured by clumsy handling. of Al-Qaeda and the disaster at Dura farms, while coalition casualties remained minimal, intelligence failures would continue to plague future operations, clouding the overall picture of the war in Iraq to such an extent that many details remain unclear.

Clear to this day The first major engagement began on March 23 when a US 3rd Infantry Division maintenance convoy took a wrong turn toward Nasseria, right at the Iraqi 3rd Corps headquarters, caught in a hastily prepared ambush. . 15 of the 18 vehicles were destroyed by heavy weapons fire and 18 American soldiers were killed or captured, but These strategic bridges over Nisseria's modest Saddam Canal were secured later that day after men from the 2nd Marine Division stormed in the city suffering heavy casualties at the hands of the determined Iraqi defenders, as if the intense urban combat wasn't enough, six Marines were also killed in a friendly engagement. fire incident when an A-10 Wild Boar mistakenly attacked their amphibious vehicle.

Finally, on the afternoon of March 24, the Marines broke through and established a perimeter north of the city that held despite multiple counterattacks by the forces. Iraqis and Saddam's fedaying militia who were fanatical not only of Saddam but apparently also of Darth Vader, further north was the city of Najaf, which was situated near the roads leading to the important cities of Karbala and Baghdad due to its strategic location. Coalition forces decided not to bypass Najaf and instead opted to isolate it. the city for fear that it could become a staging area for attacks on American supply lines.

To achieve this, the coalition needed to capture the bridges north and south of the city, elements of the 1st Brigade Combat Team attacked the north bridge codenamed Jenkins in the early hours of March 25, but made slow progress until joined by reinforcements. Before dawn, the Americans finally forced their way across the bridge despite desperate attempts by Iraqi engineers to destroy it, around the same time as American forces advanced on the south bridge, code-named Floyd Resistance. by regular military and militia forces was intense in both places on one occasion an Iraqi drove a city bus at

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speed into an M3 Bradley CFV on March 26 Najaf was successfully surrounded and the attackers were relieved by the 101st Airborne Over the next few days the Americans swept through the city with tanks and infantry, the 101st deliberately left open a single road out of the city in hopes of using it as a kill zone for escaping troops on April 1, some tired Iraqi soldiers They took the bait and were ambushed by snipers. and helicopter gunships and the city finally fell on April 4 to the south.

British forces had unexpected difficulties in taking Basra and its nearby port. From 27 March they reduced the Iraqi garrison defending the valuable port over the course of two weeks when they finally gained control of the vital waterway, only 11 British had been killed, while the Iraqis had lost between 40 andFifty times that number, when the British armor finally reached the city, they were greeted by jubilant locals, just as US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had predicted. Unfortunately, however, the crowds quickly turned into mobs of looters. The last major engagement before coalition forces reached Baghdad was at the Battle of the Karbala Gap, a strip of land approximately 25 miles or 40 kilometers long flanked by the Euphrates and Rezaza rivers.

Iraqi commanders were well aware of the strategic importance of the gap. important and had placed two elite Republican Guard divisions to block the American advance, however, Saddam Hussein's son's crusade severely weakened the defense by redirecting some of them northward, which proved to be a fatal mistake on 1 In April, American troops broke through and reached the Euphrates at the town of Museeb, although several Iraqi armored divisions counterattacked on the night of April 3, were repulsed by aircraft and rocket fire, and the coalition held on to the important head of bridge with the road to Baghdad open to force and victory on the horizon began one last bloody fight for the capital as the Iraqi army had almost completely disintegrated.

At that time, the Baffista party militias that controlled the city did not hesitate to use clandestine tactics to stop the coalition's advance after prolonged skirmishes with the defenders. Colonel David Perkins launched an offensive. On April 5, a surprise run by nearly 30 tanks directly into the city, once behind enemy lines, the column came under heavy fire from militiamen disguised as civilians, but Perkins was able to identify their defensive positions and execute a retreat. of combat. US Marines stormed the Diallo Bridge. On the eastern side of the city and advanced along the north bank of the Euphrates, aware that this flank was almost completely undefended, the nervous troops fired at any car that refused to board for fear of suicide bombers in the middle of it.

The Perkins massacre caused another thunderclap in the heart of the capital on the seventh and was rewarded by spending the night in one of Saddam's opulent palaces. After a last desperate defense by the militias, the city was finally captured on April 9. some initial celebrations by Iraqi civilians, including widespread vandalism of statues and portraits depicting the now defeated Saddam. However, as in Basra, massive waves of looting soon followed and continued until American forces suppressed the offenders, but Saddam himself proved elusive and would not be captured for many months. They spent their time securing the occupation and searching for other high-value government officials who had escaped the invasion, but while the coalition searched for these officials, violence soon broke out among Iraq's minority groups and the insurgents began gathering anyway.

On May 1, 2003 off the coast of San Diego President Bush made a dramatic appearance landing on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln Former Air National Guard Airman wore a flight suit for his televised speech in front of a national audience standing in front to a huge banner reading mission accomplished announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq at the time when the proclamation seemed reasonable the Iraqi army was in ruins and Saddam Hussein had been reduced from autocrat to fugitive but despite all appearances the problems were just beginning for the next eight years the coalition was involved in a prolonged counterinsurgency and suffered numerous casualties, while many thousands of civilians lost their lives in 2003.

The mission may have been accomplished and the brief conventional phase of combat may have ended, but like Afghanistan, the war in Iraq had barely begun. griffin johnson, the armchair historian, and in today's episode we will take a second look at the controversial topic of the 2003 Iraq War, this time, however, we will cover the events from the Iraqi perspective exploring how the Iraqi people reacted to the invasion and subsequent occupation by Western powers We will also see the rise of extremism and sectarianism that occurred after the overthrow of President Saddam Hussein's regime and how all this set the stage for the many years of insurrections, civil war and international intervention;

It cannot be overemphasized how the 2003 invasion was a huge surprise to the Iraqi people, even as President George Bush gave Iraq his famous 48-hour ultimatum. Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein remained convinced that American forces lacked the capacity to undertake more than a limited military campaign against his country. Saddam and his generals were well aware of past American failures, such as the infamous Black Hawk incident during the Somali civil war. Saddam had also studied the conflict in Vietnam and hoped to replicate the North Vietnamese success by bogging down any invasion with a defensive war of attraction with graphic scenes of destruction captured on American television screens.

Saddam hoped that popular opinion would quickly turn against the conflict until that coalition forces withdrew in disgrace, but as we will see, many factors conspired to doom the Iraqi war effort long before the first shots were fired, chief among these factors Saddam's legendary paranoia that caused men like Joseph Stalin seem completely sane in comparison. His direct preparations for war were far outweighed by his efforts to completely enclose the Iraqi population, investing enormous resources in the state security apparatus and the surveillance programs of many of the intelligence organizations. that Saddam created, in fact, had as their main task spying on each other, being late to the blame game was fatal, so these various agencies happily spent months chasing ghosts and inventing elaborate conspiracy theories, naturally the sentence for being accused in this web of lies and intrigue was always the same death, as expected, this madness had a profound effect on the country's military preparation.

Saddam valued loyalty above all other traits and divided his forces into three groups based on his perceived reliability: the regular army, the Republican Guard, and finally, the Special Republican Guard. Guard or srg visits between officers from different army groups were prohibited and joint operations were unthinkable. An SRG commander recalled that after the war we never coordinated with the Republican Guard. I had no relationship with any other unit or combat force. Other units were never allowed near our unit visits between other officers were never allowed in Saddam's mind the only possible reason two officers from different units would want to talk to each other would be to discuss a coup d'état and yet Despite its highly dysfunctional leadership, the average Iraqi soldier entered battle with a surprising degree of misplaced confidence.

For years the military was bombarded with religious rhetoric promising that infidel Americans would soon fall before the sword of Islam. The prevailing attitude among The military was that the United States was a paper tiger capable of unleashing a terrifying war but unable to withstand any serious losses. Since his successful coup in the late 1960s, Saddam Hussein had ruled Iraq at the head of the functioning Arab socialist Baathist party. As the central government and controlled all aspects of state policy, given his unusually long reign, an entire generation of Iraqis had grown up. Having experienced nothing more than Saddam's dictatorship, very few could imagine a world without their tyrannical leader wielding absolute power over their daily lives;

Yet despite Saddam's oppression, it is striking how openly hostile the average Iraqi citizen was toward their supposed American liberators for 12 years. Once known as the distant oppressor who drops terror from the skies via airstrikes and subverts Iraqi culture by funding insurrection movements, while the few natives who benefited from Western education experienced decades of villainization and dehumanization at the hands of the party. Baathist who painted them as traitors who sold out. Many Iraqis were even more distrustful of the United States after its behavior during the Iran-Iraq War, when they applauded Saddam as an indispensable ally in the Middle East only to turn against his regime as soon as it threatened American interests.

In Kuwait, Saddam's regime also had a natural heir to legitimacy thanks to its close ties to Islam. This was due to his extensive program of building mosques throughout Iraq and his decades of manipulation to bring his citizens into a state of unconditional religious devotion, even those Muslims who hated his dictatorship. He still viewed his regime as inherently preferable to a democratic state, especially one subject to degenerate Western influences. This was a concept that the United States was simply not used to dealing with and led to many problems later on. A second, possibly much more important factor was that the United States did not take into account the ideological divide between the two main branches of Islam, the Sunnis and the Shiites.

The reigning Baathist party was made up primarily of Sunni Muslims, while neighboring Iran had experienced a revolution in 1979 that resulted in the creation of a Shia-controlled Islamic republic. Fearful of a similar revolution in Iraq, Saddam brutally oppressed his Shiite subjects, excluding them from positions of authority and carrying out mass executions whenever there was any sign of rebellion, but such tyrannical measures, although effective in the short term, only served to stoking the fire of sectarian violence that would explode out of control almost from the moment American forces crossed the border. Much of the chaos that followed the invasion could have been avoided if the invading coalition forces had drafted a workable plan to achieve stability after a regime change.

Unfortunately, this was not the case. The case and civil disorder quickly became the order of the day with Shiite militant groups seeking revenge against their former Sunni oppressors. Trouble peaked in the capital city of Baghdad, which fell into a state of virtual anarchy following its capture of merchant Muhammad Abbas, who had fled the city. When the Americans approached, they said that when I returned to Baghdad it was not the city I had left just a week before, people were seen walking everywhere carrying looted goods. Nowhere could you see any sign of law and order, no police, no military, no government, nothing.

Feelings of betrayal among the civilian population perhaps peaked after the attack on Altar in early 2004, when US forces entered and ransacked a mosque whose imam had recently begun preaching anti-American rhetoric and giving bomb-making lessons to possible insurgents. Although a large cache of weapons and explosives was discovered during the attack, Muslims across Iraq were horrified by images of the holy site desecrated with furniture smashed and copies of the Holy Quran scattered on the ground. To make matters worse, the Americans offered no apologies. . simply publishing a list of the seized items and dismissing the matter as simply another routine operation against Saddam's forces.

Extremist clerics were quick to seize this golden opportunity by denouncing the occupiers as demons whose sole purpose was to wage war against the faithful of Islam to help this narrative, terrorists and militia groups attacked coalition bases dressed as civilians, Forcing American soldiers to treat everyone as a potential threat, this created a vicious cycle of mutual distrust, each act of bad faith on the part of one side triggering retaliation by the other, which only led to further escalation. Given how volatile the situation was, coalition forces quickly announced an interim government to provide a peaceful transition to democracy, but when the members of the new Iraqi governing council were revealed, the public was shocked to discover that it consisted of 13 Shiites and only 10 Sunnis, five of them. who were Kurdish minorities for the Americans this was simply a matter of proportional representation after all, the Shiites were the majority;

However, for Iraq's Sunni loyalists, the place of the coalition that formed a government led by Shiites and Kurds was proof that Saddam's anti-Western attitude the rhetoric had been correct all along the situation was not helped by the behavior of some Shiitesopportunists who quickly stepped in to fill the void left by their Sunni counterparts to summon Sunni government employee Abu Mustafa; All these senior officials had simply disappeared and soon we began to see a new sectarian order, people who claimed to be carrying out the orders of the Shia religious authorities began to fill the positions left vacant by the two disappeared, they began to verbally abuse and dismiss Sunnis or Anyone they distrusted, fortunately for the United States, there was still an organization that had a solid plan to deal with the rising tensions in Iraq.

The CIA after the invasion, the CIA was in charge of tracking down and capturing so many members of the former agencies. As Iraqi intelligence agencies as possible, their efforts were finally successful when they assembled a huge coterie of bipartisan loyalists, many of whom openly admitted to torture, murder, and various criminal activities. After listening carefully to the various testimonies made against these men, the CIA quickly concluded that there was only one reasonable course of action to immediately offer them their jobs and rebuild. The core of Saddam's police state from the ground up, the CIA rationalized this decision with the logic that under Saddam terrorist activity in the region had been kept to a minimum and therefore there was nothing inherently wrong with their methods, only their objectives with all the worst aspects. of the old regime that was now being restored by the very people who claimed to be its liberators, the Iraqi people were finally pushed into the abyss an explosion of violence shook the nation and the capital city was divided into warring suburbs between Sunnis and Shiites, the The occupiers could do little but watch as chaos engulfed the nation.

Their efforts to help were constantly blocked by the radicalism of their own inability to understand Iraqi culture. This bitterness and mistrust created an atmosphere where coalition soldiers saw danger around every corner. The political vacuum left by Saddam's defeat also allowed many extremist organizations to gain a significant foothold in the Middle East, turning the country into a war zone between government forces and radical militias. By 2006, violence had escalated to become a large-scale civil war in which attempts at ethnic cleansing by both Sunnis and Shiites occurred, resulting in the displacement of several million people to this day Iraq remains one of the most unstable countries on the planet : US forces withdrew in 2011 and returned in 2014 to combat the growing power of ISIS in the region, in the face of endless threats both external and internal.

The democratic state that now rules the nation is constantly paralyzed by the meddling of foreign intelligence agencies and the deep, bitter divisions among its population, but with ISIS finally losing its territory in the country in 2017, some still cling to faint hope. that Iraq may finally be recovering its territory. stand as a modern nation, yet there is still much work to do.