Christopher Bellamy: Small-scale resistance makes good TV, but the push to Baghdad is what counts

The fourth day of the new Gulf War was a frustrating one for the United States and its ally, Britain. Most of the Allied casualties so far have been caused by accidents or "friendly fire", most notably the loss of an RAF Tornado returning to Kuwait to a US Patriot missile.

But yesterday Allied casualties to enemy fire started mounting, including 50 US troops hit in battles on the Euphrates. The Allied leaderships never promised an easy victory, but maybe they did not do enough to dispel the expectations that there would be one.

Small Iraqi – or, at any rate, opposition – forces put up sometimes dogged resistance which, in spite of their overwhelming firepower superiority the British and US troops appeared slow to overcome.

Yesterday, British and US troops were reported to be just 100 miles from Baghdad (a city with a million more people than Rome). Four days into the war, the Allied strategy is becoming clear. In spite of small-scale resistance, which has inevitably attracted media coverage, the over-arching intent is to bypass resistance, to seal off places where there is Iraqi resistance, such as the port of Basra, and head up the two big rivers – the Tigris and Euphrates – for Baghdad.

The Allied strategy here mirrors that more erratically pursued by Nazi Germany in its attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. Head for Moscow, head for the oilfields of the Caucasus. But do not take Leningrad (modern St Petersburg) by storm. Just besiege it. Baghdad is Moscow and Basra, like Leningrad, is the second city.

Ministry of Defence sources indicated yesterday that Allied troops would reach Baghdad by Tuesday. Given current rates of advance, that still seems feasible. But the US 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanised) at the spearhead of the Allied advance in the west looks set to come up against up to six Iraqi Republican Guard divisions. In past wars, that would be a potentially disastrous encounter. However, we can be reasonably sure that large Iraqi formations massing to attack the advancing British and US troops will be spotted in plenty of time and destroyed from the air. The US air superiority permits quite different force balances on the ground.

Allied planners are probably anxious to see the Republican Guard engaged. Ironically, massed Iraqi formations will, in some ways, be easier to deal with than small groups of determined Iraqi infantry. That is what has held up the US and British troops around Umm Qasr and Basra. Allied commanders do not want casualties, and the loss of numerous British lives, already, to accidents and "blue on blues" – "friendly fire" – is a bitter blow.

Yesterday's media coverage was dominated by TV pictures of US Marines engaging a small but determined Iraqi resistance group and of Iraqi security officials and police in central Baghdad searching for two US aircrew reportedly downed after their plane was hit in a daylight raid over central Baghdad. As soon as the pictures came on midday yesterday, it looked as if the whole thing was an elaborate charade. Iraqi police machine-gunning clumps of reeds on the banks of the Tigris, searching for the downed aircrew. Had they pulled an American out, alive or dead, they would have made good use of the pictures, for that is the one thing the US public does not want to see.

Many of the prisoners taken have been wearing civilian clothes, and some are reported to be Fedayyin – Islamist extremists fighting with Iraq, but not Iraqi regulars or even Iraqi nationals. But such reports need to be treated with caution. That is exactly the message the Allied spin-doctors would want spun. But it is likely that representatives of President Saddam's elite Republican Guard had been sent into Basra, to "encourage" the Iraqi army to keep fighting – just like the German SS and the Soviet NKVD "blocking detachments" and "destroyer battalions" in the Second World War.

Live TV pictures of the fighting, which are necessarily highly selective, make individual battles seem more important than they really are. There are a quarter of a million British and US troops fighting in the theatre of war and up to 350,000 people in the Iraqi armed forces. But all it takes is a small group of Iraqis to put up a fight and the whole, massive operation is slowed down. That is what was happening yesterday. Small groups still clung on to oppose the British and US troops in Umm Qasr, just across the border from Kuwait, and in Basra.

Against the overall strategic background, with the main thrusts diverging up the Tigris and Euphrates and converging again on Baghdad, these engagements, while dramatic, are not as significant as they appear. Meanwhile, Allied planners probably hope that an even more devastating strike on Baghdad or other leadership centres will finally break the Iraqi regime.

Christopher Bellamy is professor of military science and doctrine at Cranfield University.