ABSTRACT

In March of 2003, as 250,000 Coalition troops poured across Iraq’s southern border to defeat the ten divisions Saddam had positioned in the South, a small group of highly trained special operations forces (SOF) working with U.S. air power and Kurdish rebels attacked the thirteen divisions Saddam had stationed in the north of the country. Not only did the SOF forces in the North engage a larger force than the heavy divisions in the South, they took fewer casualties (U.S. SOF suffered no fatalities) and did it with only days of preparation and highly constrained air power resources. What is more, when the war ended, because northern Iraq was mainly controlled by Kurdish Iraqis who had fought with Americans, stability operations in that area were initially significantly more successful than in the central region of the country.