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Even as it closes in on Saddam, the military faces the larger task of maintaining order in a country full of conflicts waiting to erupt. Last week more than 1,000 Turkish troops crossed the border into Kurdish-dominated northern Iraq to reinforce up to 7,000 already there, raising the dreaded possibility of a confrontation between the Turks and anti-Saddam Kurdish forces, who fear the Turks will never leave. Because Ankara refused to allow the U.S. to send ground troops into northern Iraq through Turkey, the U.S. may not be able to do much if skirmishes break out. "We don't have the kind of force that could really stand between the Turks and the Kurds," says a U.S. official.
As allied troops begin to liberate Iraqi cities from Saddam's tyranny, the battle for the hearts and minds of 22 million Iraqis will remain impossible to win so long as the country is under relentless U.S. bombardment. A nagging anxiety among U.S. commanders is that the toll on Iraqi civilians is bound to increase if the allies face stiffer resistance near Baghdad. Although Rumsfeld insisted that the U.S.'s massive aerial blitz has spared not just civilians but also infrastructure targets like roads, bridges and power plants, there was less certainty among some of the soldiers who carried out the attacks. "We want to avoid collateral damage, but that is the most difficult thing," said a combat pilot aboard the U.S.S. Constellation after returning from a bombing run. "When we drop that bomb, we know that someone is dying."
Although the battlefield produced the usual fog of conflicting reports, at least one thing was made clear with the first salvo: the principal target of Gulf War II is not the Iraqi military but Saddam himself. Inside the U.S. war rooms, quickly decapitating the Iraqi regime is seen as critical to bringing about the destruction of the enemy. "We want to turn the Iraqi military into a chicken with its head cut off," a senior Navy official says. Saddam "might be able to strike back, but it will be uncoordinated and ultimately fruitless." Defense sources say that U.S. forces will rush to Baghdad as quickly as possible to try to corner Saddam and flush him out into the open; if a coup or assassination fails to dislodge him, U.S. air and ground forces plan to launch more strikes against critical targets inside the capital in an effort to kill him. A senior U.S official told TIME that covert U.S. intelligence personnel have infiltrated Baghdad, hunting in the shadows for the Iraqi leaders. "We've had some folks on the ground over there now for weeks," the official says.