Eyewitness: Few tank drives can have been on this scale
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Your support makes all the difference.The BBC's Gavin Hewitt on a US armoured vehicle at the head of a column surging north across the Iraqi desert:
"Here with one of three brigades of the American 3rd Infantry Division, we're pushing deep inside Iraq.
We've now been driving north for nine hours, having left the Kuwaiti-Iraqi border at about 04.30 in the morning, and we're still driving.
It is quite an impressive sight – our column of armour with all lights dimmed, just little red pencil lights on the vehicles in front, pushing forward into the border zone.
This column stretches back for several kilometres. The US 3rd Infantry Division said when they crossed into Iraq there would be 10,000 vehicles. Not all of them are in this column, but it gives some idea of the scale.
Our column is made up principally of Abrams and Bradley fighting vehicles.
I suspect there have been few tank drives or forward pushes in history on the scale and at the pace of this one.
I think part of the intention is to persuade the Iraqis, when this column eventually does appear, of the enormity of the American power and that there's not much purpose in resisting.
That said, we have encountered no Iraqi opposition and have seen very few Iraqi people.
We pushed through a hole in the barbed wire marking the end of the demilitarised zone.
We stayed in a column for a couple of hours until the desert opened up and then the tanks and fighting vehicles began to disperse into a formation 4km wide. This box formation – armour at the front, armour at the flank – has continued now for a further seven hours.
And apart for an hour's refuelling, when big tankers came up as soon as we stopped, we have been pushing on at a pace. Our speed has varied, but we're doing roughly 40kph.
Several times we passed through what appeared to be military camps and blackened pieces of equipment and armed personnel carriers that had clearly been hit during previous air strikes – during Desert Storm in 1991 perhaps. We also passed through one area where leaflets had been dropped by US-led forces.
I know, when we have stopped or slowed and I've looked back, that what you can see on either flank is tanks and fighting vehicles stretching back for miles. What I cannot tell you is where we are and where we are heading."
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