Failure of Rumsfeld's 'War Lite' strategy leads Allies to bring in the heavies

It was the day the war changed gear. As the Iraqis preened themselves on the success of their battlefield strategy to date and another apparently misdirected missile reaped the worst civilian death toll of any single incident in Baghdad, Washington and London tacitly acknowledged it was time for a rethink. They had tried it the easy way but Donald Rumsfeld's business-school approach of War Lite, with just-in-time levels of troops and supplies had failed. It was time to do it the old-fashioned, hard way and bring in the heavies. The Allies, it seemed yesterday, were taking a deep breath as realisation dawned.

For a while, the old and the new approaches are operating in tandem. Overnight, Tony Blair was at the United Nations in New York for talks with the secretary general, Kofi Annan, on the role of the UN in a post-war Iraq. Later the French, in an apparent thawing of cross-Channel relations, put their names with the British to a draft Security Council resolution to restart the oil-for-food programme in Iraq – and transfer control of it from Saddam Hussein to Kofi Annan. The Security Council unanimously passed the measure last night.

But developments on the battlefield have lessened the urgency of Mr Blair's effort to bind diplomatic wounds by bringing the UN on board with post-war reconstruction. Post-war anything seemed further away than ever before.

The day before, the US President and British Prime Minister, in a joint press conference after their Camp David summit, seemed determined to send out a tough message to those guilty of Week One wobbles. The coalition will fight for "however long it takes", the President said. But, as Day Nine progressed, it became clear that the anxieties that this war could last for months, and be bloodier than public opinion was led to expect, were not without foundation.

Bombing had been heavy on the Iraqi capital overnight, as on nights previously. But a change had occurred. The night had been among the most violent of the war so far. The most powerful weapons used to date – two 4,700lb satellite-guided "bunker-busting" bombs – had been dropped. Their target was "a major communication centre and command-and-control facility" on the east bank of the Tigris river. It was a telephone exchange in a main shopping area. And it was the first time that the Allies have deliberately chosen a target which is an important part of the civilian infrastructure.

The increased intensity was not without its heavy costs. An explosion in a market in Baghdad's Shula district, apparently caused by a cruise missile, killed at least 50 people and injured several dozen more, according to Iraqi officials and eyewitness accounts. Graphic television pictures showed people scrabbling through rubble to reach the dead and injured in what is sure to be another severe public-relations disaster for the Americans and British and one more reason for the Iraqis to vow to defend their country, rather than capitulate to the invading forces.

The effort to bring aid into Iraq, meanwhile, was not without its setbacks either. Just after dawn the British ship Sir Galahad began its slow approach to the southern port of Umm Qasr behind a navy mine-hunter along a channel 50 miles long but only 200 metres wide. The route had been swept by teams of minesweepers, some working with dolphins. Its captain said he had emptied the fuel tanks in the bows, just in case. It eventually docked at midday, almost a week after anticipated in the first optimistic days of the war. But the 600 tons of food and water unloaded as aid is, according to aid workers, going to prove difficult to distribute because of the lack of security – even in the far south where forces have spent days trying to dislodge Iraqi troops.

Coalition forces, there and further north, were hoping that, with the sandstorms gone, they might be able to regain the initiative. As the troops moved in, US Marines reported that they had captured an Iraqi general in Nasiriyah on Thursday, after bursting into his home, where they also found documents and a safe.

Journalists "embedded" with various units, there and elsewhere, began reporting that the level and intensity of resistance from Iraqi regular troops, and most particularly from the Fedayeen paramilitaries, had been dispiriting. "From talking to quite a few marines here," reported one BBC correspondent, "they are admitting that the way this conflict has been going has worn them down. It wasn't the kind of fighting they were expecting, and it has affected morale."

Another journalist reported the frustration of US Marines that "every time they engage Iraqi units they often find these Iraqi units just change into civilian clothes and then melt away. And then next thing they know [they] are being hit from behind by ... guerrilla fighters."

These are not isolated incidents. In comments said to have caused unease in the Pentagon, the US Army's senior ground commander in Iraq, General William Wallace, told The Washington Post: "The enemy we're fighting is different from the one we'd war-gamed against. We knew they were there [the paramilitaries] but we didn't know they would fight like this." The general warned that long supply lines and Iraqi guerrilla-style tactics had reduced the chances of the swift war that military planners had hoped for.

In response, Pentagon officials announced that 120,000 reinforcements are being summoned to assist the 90,000 US-led troops now inside Iraq. But they insisted the deployments – which will take place "over the next few weeks" – have been planned for some time, many of them having originally been earmarked for an assault from the north through Turkey, until the anti-war Turkish parliament scuppered the plan.

The Iraqi air base at Talil, outside Nasiriyah, which was captured in the first 36 hours of the campaign, was opened after work on the runway to take large US transport planes. The first landed in what will be a significant help to the logistic chain to get fuel, food and ammunition to troops nearer Baghdad. The main task of the new troops will be to defend that supply chain.

But further evidence of the need for the military rethink came yesterday in Basra. Initial hopes of Allied troops being met by crowds of liberated cheering Iraqis have now evaporated. The problem does not necessarily lie in the disposition of the ordinary people – that will remain unknown until the apparatus of Saddam's state repression has been lifted. What is hampering things is the extent to which the Baath party apparatus is still effectively in place.

Some 2,000 civilians tried to break out of Basra, to flee through Allied lines. About half of them made it across a bridge out of the strategic town. But then Iraqi militia opened fire using machine-guns and mortars to force them back into the city. The Black Watch battalion, part of the British force which has been encircling Basra for five days, fired on the militia. Attempts to get British military ambulances through to injured civilians were unsuccessful. Failed attempts like this do not augur well for the possibility of uprisings against President Saddam by ordinary Iraqis elsewhere, particularly not in Baghdad where his systems of internal control are strongest. Evidence of this was provided by Saddam's television station which paraded three Iraqi men arrested on suspicion of spying for the US.

The capital provides another potentially more serious problem. Top Iraqi officials in Baghdad acknowledged, without apparent perturbation, that they expected US-led forces, who have been within 60 miles of the outskirts for some time, to surround the city within five to 10 days. Their intention, said the Defence Minister, Sultan Hashem Ahmed, was that Allied troops will have to fight their way in street by street. "The enemy must come inside Baghdad and that will be its grave," he said.

Iraqi officials warned that hundreds of thousands of Baghdad citizens would be armed and would engage in hand-to-hand conflict. Their hope is that images of dead soldiers which – together with footage of the innocent victims of stray Western bombs – will turn opinion violently against the war and create the political pressure which would halt it.

Tony Blair faced more immediate domestic political problems. The row rumbled on over his statement at the Camp David press conference that the two British soldiers whose bodies had been shown on al-Jazeera television had, in fact, been executed. The men's families were outraged and complained that they had been been told by the Army that their loved ones had been killed instantly in battle. Staff Sergeant Simon Cullingworth, 36, and Sapper Luke Allsopp, 24, had gone missing when caught in enemy fire near Zubayr. "We can't understand why people are lying about what happened," said Sapper Allsopp's sister, Nina.

The veteran Labour MP Tam Dalyell accused the Prime Minister of talking "gibberish" and the shadow Chancellor, Michael Howard, warned the Government not to blame the cost of war for any bad news it announces in the Budget on 9 April. On top of which came the prospect of more embarrassing questions as first reports came in of another fatal "friendly fire" incident involving two Scimitar vehicles being attacked from the air by A-10 tankbuster missiles somewhere near Basra.

All of this uncertainty was seized upon by opponents of war. The Russian President, Vladimir Putin, called for an immediate end to the war. "The war is in danger of rocking global stability and the foundations of international law," he said. "The only correct solution ... is the immediate end to military activity and resumption of a political settlement in the UN Security Council."

Other members of the anti-war alliance may have been preoccupied with other matters. Refugees fleeing war-torn Iraq should stay in neighbouring countries instead of coming to Europe, the German Interior Minister, Otto Schily, said at an EU justice and interior ministers' meeting in northern Greece. The French, meanwhile were fending off questions about the entente not-so-cordiale: in London the Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin, when asked if he hoped coalition forces would win, replied: "I am not going to answer. You have not been listening carefully to what I said before."

But across the Arab world, where yesterday was a holy day, anti-US and anti-British demonstrations broke out after Friday prayers. Effigies of President Bush were burnt, along with the American, British and Israeli flags. Tens of thousands protested in Egypt, Jordan and Tehran where windows were broken and red paint thrown at the British embassy. In Bahrain it was the third successive day of demonstrations. And a new type of talk was heard abroad – about how the faltering of the Allied attacks might mean they were not necessarily going to win. Perhaps it would end in a deal or a UN ceasefire – a prospect which Donald Rumsfeld scathingly dismissed. "There isn't going to be a ceasefire," the US Defence Secretary said.

Some good news for the coalition came from the incipient northern front. US cargo planes delivered supplies to the 1,000 troops parachuted in on Thursday. With them went 200 more troops. Elsewhere in the north, Kurdish militiamen crossed the front line into Iraqi government-controlled territory and seized control of a hilltop position guarding the advance to Kirkuk. And some 5000 peshmerga, backed by US special forces and air support, began pushing from the west towards the mountain strongholds held by the radical Ansar-al-Islam group in the mountains of north-eastern Iraq. In retaliation the Iraqis shelled the Kurdish-controlled town of Chamchamal.

But what was clear to everyone as Day Nine drew to a close was that the original notions of "shock and awe" has not produced the swift results which briefers had led the American and British people to expect. A serious re-examination of tactics is under way.

Invasion of Iraq - day's events

* FRIDAY 8.30am GMT: Tony Blair says he does not know if Saddam Hussein is alive, dead, injured or unharmed.

* 9am: Iraqi paramilitary forces in Basra fire mortars and machine-guns at fleeing civilians.

* 10.50am: 120,000 extra US troops to go to Iraq.

* 12.30pm: British supply ship Sir Galahad docks at Umm Qasr with first military relief aid.

* 1pm: French government insists it hopes US-led forces will quickly win the war.

* 2.30pm: Headquarters of Ansar al-Islam militant group overrun by Kurdish guerrillas backed by US special forces.

* 3.40pm: Iraqis shell Kurdish-controlled town of Chamchamal in northern Iraq .

* 5.30pm: Security Council unanimously approves resolution on UN humanitarian aid for Iraq.

Words of war

French foreign ministry spokesman Dominique De Villepin:

"I will remind you that the minister said on March 24: 'The United States, we hope, will win this war quickly.'"

Gen William Wallace, US ground commander in Iraq:

"The enemy we're fighting is different from the one we'd war-gamed against."

Iraq's defence minister, Sultan Hashim Ahmed:

"The enemy must come inside Baghdad, and that will be its grave."