March 28, 2003

WASHINGTON, March 27 — Intelligence analysts warned senior Pentagon officials before the war in Iraq began that Iraqi paramilitary units would fight back and could pose a significant threat to American-led coalition forces, officials said today.

The Central Intelligence Agency issued a report last month that said that paramilitary units loyal to Saddam Hussein could threaten rear areas during an allied advance. The agency report also raised concerns about the possibility that the paramilitary forces could mount attacks against Iraqi civilians and use other irregular methods to try to tie down coalition forces.

Analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency also voiced concerns about the paramilitary forces in the months leading up to war with Iraq, and warned the military leadership about the threat from guerrilla-style attacks. Officials said the issue was also raised by analysts at the National Ground Intelligence Center, another branch of military intelligence. Still, intelligence officials cautioned that the warnings provided by analysts about paramilitary forces should not be overstated, since other potential threats received much more attention. "You can't overspin this and say this was considered the biggest threat by the analysts," one official said. "A lot more attention was paid to the Republican Guard and to the possible use of weapons of mass destruction," the official added. "Those were considered the biggest problems."

The fact that analysts had raised the issue in intelligence reports but did not make it a dominant theme might help explain why commanders in the field, who might not have read the fine print of every report, were caught by surprise when the paramilitary forces first appeared.

The optimism of the political leadership at the Pentagon that Mr. Hussein's government would quickly collapse in the face of an American-led invasion may also have overridden concerns among analysts about the possibility that Iraqi forces would use guerrilla tactics.

Officials have said top Pentagon policy makers were strongly influenced in their belief that the Baghdad government was brittle by accounts from Iraqi dissident leaders who said they expected relatively little opposition to the invasion.

Warnings that two paramilitary groups close to Mr. Hussein ó the Fedayeen Saddam and the Special Security Organization ó might fight were also raised last October in a National Intelligence Estimate, a classified document that offered a consensus view of the entire intelligence community on the problems facing American forces in ground combat in Iraq.

Both Iraqi groups are believed to have sent out forces against coalition troops in the opening days of the war.

"There was a good deal of stuff about the threats posed by the fedayeen in the intelligence reports," one official said.

Since the war began last week, the fedayeen, Baath Party irregulars often dressed in civilian clothes, have been using guerrilla tactics to inflict casualties and slow the advance of American and British conventional forces. American commanders in the field have said they have been surprised by the threat to troops and supply lines posed by the forces, which have apparently been sent south from Bagdhad to fight the coalition force before it reaches the capital.

The Fedayeen Saddam are believed to have first been established in the mid-1990's by Mr. Hussein's son Uday Hussein and have been recruited from within the ranks of the governing Baath Party.

There have been estimates that the organization has between 30,000 and 60,000 members that were used before the war as black-hooded political enforcers for the government and now as lightly armed guerrilla fighters. Their objective appears to be to attack the allied forces before they can bring their full weight against the Republican Guard divisions defending Baghdad.

The paramilitary groups inflicted casualties last weekend by attacking marines after drawing them out by pretending to surrender. In other cases they have approached American and British troops dressed in civilian clothes and in nonmilitary vehicles, mingling with the Iraqi population.