Saddam's Republican Guards

There are at least two ways to recognize a member of Iraq's Republican Guards. The first is the triangular red and gold patch worn on his uniform's shoulders. The second is more subtle but just as telling: a Republican Guard tends to look healthier than a regular soldier. No wonder: the guards are paid about 300 dinars a month (roughly $900) -- double the wages of an ordinary conscript -- and are pampered with such perks as free housing and free cars.

With more than 100,000 men, the Guards make up about a fifth of the 555,000- man Iraqi army. But they are the best trained, the best equipped and the most highly motivated of all Iraqi forces. They are well outfitted with Soviet T-72M tanks, self-propelled 155-mm and 120-mm mortars and long-range guns. They also have Soviet antiaircraft missiles, and can fill the skies with ! antiaircraft flak when attacked. Six of the Guard's nine core divisions are spread in an arc along Kuwait's northern border with Iraq, while one remains in Baghdad to protect Saddam's Baathist government. Their importance to Pentagon planners has been apparent since the second day of the war, when they began absorbing massive air strikes.

The Guards, first organized in the late 1950s, became Saddam Hussein's creation in the 1970s, when they were commissioned to serve as his bodyguards. His original recruits for the Guard units were from his hometown of Tikrit in northern Iraq, and today the Guards' titular head is Hussein Kamel Hassan, 37, Saddam's son-in-law.

Saddam Hussein converted the Guard into a full-fledged fighting force during the eight-year war with Iran. Guard troops sustained heavy losses in 1986-87, but then became national heroes in 1988, when they penetrated a curtain of shell fire and were instrumental in the recapture from Iran of the Fao peninsula, the engagement that broke the back of the Iranian war effort and persuaded the Ayatullah's men to sue for peace.

Since the Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988, Guard ranks have been reinforced with the best troops from other units, all combat veterans. The Guards are among the "most formidable fighting men in the Third World," according to Richard Jupa, co-author of an upcoming article on the Guards for Army magazine. Jupa doubts that they can be defeated from the air. "They can disperse their brigades and dig in deeply," he says. "They are expert at decoys." Jupa predicts that even after heavy air bombardment, the Guards will put up a ferocious, if brief, fight in any ground war that follows.

There is another reason, however, why the allies should fear the Guards: they specialize in bombarding the enemy with poisonous gas. According to Jupa, nerve and cyanide gases were used to help win the battle at the Fao peninsula, and each Guard brigade has a company of chemical-weapons specialists.