With the siege of Baghdad only hours away, another brutal battle comes to mind. The military historian Antony Beevor, author of the acclaime...
3 min read
Whatsapp
Twitter
Facebook
Reddit
With the siege of Baghdad only hours away, another brutal battle comes to mind. The military historian Antony Beevor, author of the acclaimed Stalingrad, a book on the famous battle between the Wehrmacht German army and the Red Army during World War II, has drawn a parallel between Stalingrad and 8216;Baghdadograd8217;. After all, the avowed hero of Saddam Hussein is none other than Josef Stalin and visiting reporters to the dictator8217;s offices have described how his study is lined with books on Stalin8217;s life and thought.
Beevor recently pointed out that there are many similarities between Saddam and Stalin. Like Stalin, Saddam too uses fear, a centralised party structure and loyal commissars to maintain his absolute grip on Iraq. Saddam8217;s Republican Guard is like the NKVD People8217;s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, which was Stalin8217;s chosen instrument of terror in times when even a slip of the tongue could land you in the Gulag. At the height of Stalin8217;s dictatorship, 190 million lived in abject terror of a single man, just as in Iraq no one dares to question, how in the recent plebiscite, Saddam received 100 per cent of the popular vote.
You’ve Read Your Free Stories For Now
Sign up and keep reading more stories that matter to you.
Now it remains to be seen if the battle for Baghdad will be similar to the battle for Stalingrad, a crucial battle in 1942-43 which became a turning point in the war against Hitler. In 1942, waves of bombings by the Luftwaffe had reduced Stalingrad to rubble making it, in fact, an ideal terrain for ambushing advancing ground troops. The Wehrmacht were beaten back by the Red Army led by General Zhukov. It turned out that the efforts of the German airforce had actually worked to the detriment of the German campaign on the ground. But, although urban warfare together with the catastrophic Russian winter led to the death of thousands of German troops and a victory for Russia, yet this is a story that is decades old. Today, with the most technologically advanced army in history at the gates of a decaying city, with no possibility of a Russian winter, the battle of Baghdad is unlikely to follow the exact pattern of the battle of Stalingrad, however striking the parallels between the two dictators.
