What Ever Happened To The Republican Guard?

During their onslaught against the Republican Guard in the southern approaches to Baghdad, U.S. military commanders had grim words to describe what they were doing to the elite Iraqi forces. "I find it interesting when folks say we're softening them up," Air Force Lieut. General T. Michael Moseley, the air-war commander, said on April 5, the day the U.S. Army entered Baghdad. "We're not softening them up. We're killing them." Later on, in its assessment of the damage the U.S. had wrought, the Pentagon focused on devastation to the Guard's armor, concluding, for example, that all but two dozen of their 800 tanks had been destroyed or abandoned. But a central mystery of the war remains: What happened to the people, the thousands of Republican Guard soldiers arrayed outside Baghdad who were subjected to the full wrath of the most powerful military on earth?

TIME set out to answer that question by traversing the two rough arcs along which the Republican Guard were deployed south of Iraq's capital. Our reporters focused on seven battlefields: Hindiyah, Hillah, Kut, Yusufiyah, Mahmudiyah, Suwayrah and Dawrah. They surveyed the aftermath of the fighting, inspected graveyards, visited hospitals and interviewed eyewitnesses. They also spoke to Republican Guard survivors about their escape and the fates of their comrades.

The evidence that TIME's team collected indicates that relatively few members of the Republican Guard were actually killed in the fighting. According to the accounts, the Iraqi forces for the most part survived aerial bombardments by keeping their distance from their armor, which U.S. pilots targeted with great precision. Then as U.S. ground troops approached, the Republican Guard generally fled. Many of them appear to have acted on their own, motivated by fear and self-preservation. In Baghdad, according to a high-ranking Republican Guard officer interviewed by TIME, troops were actually instructed to desert. This may help explain why the members of the Special Republican Guard, deployed within Baghdad as the Iraqi regime's ultimate defenders, put up virtually no resistance to the American takeover of the city, as they felt the entire elite-forces structure collapsing around them.

Saddam Hussein must have known that the Republican Guard could not stop the advance of the U.S. military on Baghdad, but he might have imagined it could slow the onslaught. As U.S. forces swept through Iraq from Kuwait, the Iraqi command deployed four divisions--the Baghdad, Medina, Nebuchadnezzar and Hammurabi--south of the capital in two defensive arcs. The outer arc, about 100 miles long, stretched roughly from Karbala to Kut. The inner one, some 30 miles long, extended from Yusufiyah to Suwayrah. Just how many troops this involved is unclear. On paper, each of the four divisions had roughly 10,000 men, but according to U.S. intelligence, all were undermanned. Pentagon officials and outside experts estimate that the Republican Guard forces arrayed south of Baghdad that clashed with invading U.S. troops totaled somewhere between 16,000 and 24,000 men.