The Russians relayed information to Saddam during the opening days of the 2003 war, including a crucial moment before the assault on Baghdad, according to the documents in the report Friday.
The unclassified report does not assess the value of the information or provide details beyond citing two captured Iraqi documents that say the Russians collected information from sources "inside the American Central Command" and that battlefield intelligence was provided to Saddam through the Russian ambassador in Baghdad.
A classified version of the Pentagon report, titled "Iraqi Perspectives Project," is not being made public.
However, a document was uncovered today as part of the DOCEX ("Operation Iraqi Freedom Documents" which began a few weeks ago) release program that is being made public today gives us an idea of what info Russian officials were giving to Saddam. This document was translated into English from Arabic gives details on the strength and whereabouts of American Forces weeks before the war on March 2, 2003 into the hands of Saddam.
3- During the meeting the ambassador gave us the following information about the US military presence in the Gulf as per the 2nd of March:
Number of troops: 206,500 out of which 98,000 naval forces and 36,500 infantry. 90% of theses forces are in Kuwait and on the Navy ships.
US troops have reached the island of Bubiyan (Bubiyan is largest Kuwaiti island in the Kuwaiti coastal islands chain).
Number of tanks: 480
Number of armored cars: 1132
Number of artillery: 296
Number of Apache helicopters : 735
Number of fighter planes: 871
Number of Navy ships: 106. 68 in the Gulf and the rest in Oman (State of Oman), Aden (Yemen), the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea.
Number of air carriers: 5. One nuclear powered. Three in the Gulf one in the Mediterranean and one on its way.
Number of Cruise missiles: 583 based on the US Navy and distributed on 22 ships.
Number of Cruise missiles on planes: 64
Number of heavy bombers B-52 H: 10 in the Indian Ocean.
Number of B1-B: 8 present in the US base of Thumarid in Oman.
4- The ambassador pointed that what worried us (most probably “us” refers to the Russians) was the increase in the number of planes in Jordan where the number of planes in Al Sallt base was as follows:
24 planes F-16
10 planes Tornado
11 planes Harrier
He also mentioned that there were 10 A-10 tank destroyers in the Jordanian base of King Faysal.
5- The ambassador also pointed that a certain number of the 82nd Division (82nd Airborne) which was deployed in Afghanistan started coming to Kuwait. The number of troops has reached 750 soldiers.
Makes you wonder what else we'll find among the 2 plus million of Iraqi documents that were captured in Iraq. Should we be at all surprised that the Russians helped Iraq be the eyes and ears of Saddam's Army?
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