this isn't the most reliable source, but it is worth considering:
original news article
Iraq secretly bought 1,000 Kornet missiles: Pentagon
PTI[ MONDAY, MARCH 31, 2003 10:30:08 AM ]
NEW YORK: Iraqis have secretly bought as many as a thousand Russian-made Kornet anti-tank missiles which are lightweight, very powerful and easy-to-use, Pentagon officials claimed.
The sellers are Ukrainian arms dealers and possibly some entrepreneurial Syrian generals or the Syrian government itself, the officials were quoted as saying by Newsweek. They reportedly sent Baghdad some 500 Kornets in January.
The Kornet anti-tank missiles were used to attack two US tanks, both Abrams M1A1s during the ongoing war in Iraq. The first M1s ever destroyed by enemy fire in battle, they were caught in an ambush of the US Army's 3/7 Cavalry near As Samawah, on the west bank of the Euphrates River.
Two is not a large number and the invading forces have at least 650 tanks in Iraq with more on the way. But US officials, the magazine said, are worried about the skill or "at least the fanaticism" of the guerrilla fighters who sneaked up on the tanks driving a "technical," a jeep, under cover of a sandstorm.
Less than two weeks into the war, the magazine examined whether it started with enough force and whether Operation Iraqi Freedom risks blowing up into a Middle East War.
That scenario, once very remote, is no longer unthinkable, it said. Barring a sudden collapse of the Baathist regime - still a possibility, senior administration officials insist - the war in Iraq is about to get bloodier.
"Somewhere deep in his network of tunnels and bunkers," Saddam Hussein "is convinced he can win," not by defeating superior US forces on the battlefield, but merely by surviving while Islamic rage builds from Cairo to Islamabad, the magazine said quoting a senior US official.
With a show of "shock and awe," American might was supposed to overwhelm the Iraqis and crack Saddam Hussein's regime. Tipped off by a spy in his inner circle, the US military tried to kill him and his sons as they slept with a surprise "decapitation" strike on the first night of the war.
US officials were engaged in delicate secret talks with some of Saddam Hussein's henchmen which appear to have gone nowhere. Saddam Hussein is almost surely alive; the spy, according to a knowledgeable source, has been "compromised," meaning that he is probably dead.
When American soldiers began dying in ambushes from Iraqis pretending to surrender, it didn't take long for Washington officialdom to start leaking exculpatory memoranda.
One CIA memo made available to Newsweek was entitled "Iraq: Potential aRisks in Rear Areas." The paper warned of Saddam loyalists attacking American supply lines with "hit and run tactics" using "RPGs rocket-propelled grenades) and small arms."
The document was widely distributed at the Pentagon, though one intelligence official, Newsweek said, acknowledges that, given Washington's strange hothouse ways, the paper might have been more carefully read at the top if it had been stamped "TOP SECRET" instead of merely "SECRET."
Saddam Hussein's irregulars have adopted tricks from the Somali guerrillas, including firing from behind groups of women and children.
Saddam Hussein will try to increase the American death rate, possibly by ordering his commanders to use bio-chem weapons, the magazine said.
original news article
Iraq secretly bought 1,000 Kornet missiles: Pentagon
PTI[ MONDAY, MARCH 31, 2003 10:30:08 AM ]
NEW YORK: Iraqis have secretly bought as many as a thousand Russian-made Kornet anti-tank missiles which are lightweight, very powerful and easy-to-use, Pentagon officials claimed.
The sellers are Ukrainian arms dealers and possibly some entrepreneurial Syrian generals or the Syrian government itself, the officials were quoted as saying by Newsweek. They reportedly sent Baghdad some 500 Kornets in January.
The Kornet anti-tank missiles were used to attack two US tanks, both Abrams M1A1s during the ongoing war in Iraq. The first M1s ever destroyed by enemy fire in battle, they were caught in an ambush of the US Army's 3/7 Cavalry near As Samawah, on the west bank of the Euphrates River.
Two is not a large number and the invading forces have at least 650 tanks in Iraq with more on the way. But US officials, the magazine said, are worried about the skill or "at least the fanaticism" of the guerrilla fighters who sneaked up on the tanks driving a "technical," a jeep, under cover of a sandstorm.
Less than two weeks into the war, the magazine examined whether it started with enough force and whether Operation Iraqi Freedom risks blowing up into a Middle East War.
That scenario, once very remote, is no longer unthinkable, it said. Barring a sudden collapse of the Baathist regime - still a possibility, senior administration officials insist - the war in Iraq is about to get bloodier.
"Somewhere deep in his network of tunnels and bunkers," Saddam Hussein "is convinced he can win," not by defeating superior US forces on the battlefield, but merely by surviving while Islamic rage builds from Cairo to Islamabad, the magazine said quoting a senior US official.
With a show of "shock and awe," American might was supposed to overwhelm the Iraqis and crack Saddam Hussein's regime. Tipped off by a spy in his inner circle, the US military tried to kill him and his sons as they slept with a surprise "decapitation" strike on the first night of the war.
US officials were engaged in delicate secret talks with some of Saddam Hussein's henchmen which appear to have gone nowhere. Saddam Hussein is almost surely alive; the spy, according to a knowledgeable source, has been "compromised," meaning that he is probably dead.
When American soldiers began dying in ambushes from Iraqis pretending to surrender, it didn't take long for Washington officialdom to start leaking exculpatory memoranda.
One CIA memo made available to Newsweek was entitled "Iraq: Potential aRisks in Rear Areas." The paper warned of Saddam loyalists attacking American supply lines with "hit and run tactics" using "RPGs rocket-propelled grenades) and small arms."
The document was widely distributed at the Pentagon, though one intelligence official, Newsweek said, acknowledges that, given Washington's strange hothouse ways, the paper might have been more carefully read at the top if it had been stamped "TOP SECRET" instead of merely "SECRET."
Saddam Hussein's irregulars have adopted tricks from the Somali guerrillas, including firing from behind groups of women and children.
Saddam Hussein will try to increase the American death rate, possibly by ordering his commanders to use bio-chem weapons, the magazine said.
's get lucky sometimes. Forget Nazi supertanks, is anyone aware that during WWII the soviet army issued antitank *handgrenades*? They basically looked like a coffee can on a stick. It was a shaped charge which, when thrown into the air over the tank deployed a small drogue chute and (theoretically) landed on the flat "top" surface of the coffee can which lined the shape charge up to penetrate the top of the target vehicle. Now undoubtedly most of the folks who tried this ended up either run over by armor or shot down by it's accompanying infantry, but put enough of them out there and, well, there were actually guys who aced and a few who even double aced with that particular weapon...so never say never...