What Ever Happened to The Republican Guard?

摘要

During their onslaught against the Republican Guard in the southern approaches to Baghdad, U.S. military commanders had grim words to describe what they were doing to the elite Iraqi forces. "I find it interesting when folks say we're softening them up," Air Force Lieut. General T. Michael Moseley, the air-war commander, said on April 5, the day the U.S. Army entered Baghdad. "We're not softening them up. We're killing them." Later on, in its assessment of the damage the U.S. had wrought, the Pentagon focused on devastation to the Guard's armor, concluding, for example, that all but two dozen of their 800 tanks had been destroyed or abandoned. But a central mystery of the war remains: What happened to the people, the thousands of Republican Guard soldiers arrayed outside Baghdad who were subjected to the full wrath of the most powerful military on earth?