Rumaila oil field, Iraq — The night was silent and tense. British soldiers gathered us in a small circle to whisper an urgent warning of an imminent assault by one of Saddam Hussein's suicide squads.
Across the road, a U.S. military convoy had ground to a halt. Huddled in the darkness with its engines switched off and its lights extinguished, the convoy tried to make itself invisible. Nothing penetrated the darkness except the occasional bursts of faraway tracer fire and the distant orange glow of burning oil wells.
For two hours, until our group of journalists was able to dash onward to a safer military camp, we waited fearfully for the attack.
The highway through the Rumaila oil field had been considered safely under the control of U.S. and British forces. But now an unseen band of Iraqi fighters had shut it down, halting convoys and blocking supplies.
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This is the shifting reality of war in southern Iraq, where nobody is quite certain who is friend and who is foe. Roads and camps that were deemed safe yesterday are abruptly a danger zone today.
It happened again yesterday on another road in southern Iraq. This time it was a strategically crucial highway between Iraq and Kuwait. Someone had spotted men armed with rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons in the Iraqi border town of Safwan. The road and the border were closed for several hours because of worries that the gunmen were planning to ambush a military convoy.
The temporary closing was highly significant because the road through Safwan is a key supply route for the U.S. and British forces, connecting their forward bases with the main highway from Kuwait's airport and seaport. It showed that the coalition's supply routes are vulnerable to attack by small groups of Iraqi gunmen.
When this war began, the U.S. and British military planners had a clear strategy: bypass the towns and control the major roads and highways so that their forces could roll relentlessly toward Baghdad. The strategy worked well in the first few days.
But now, in the south of Iraq, the strategy is faltering. None of the major towns are firmly under the coalition's control. Some towns are descending into chaos and lawlessness, with nobody capable of filling the power vacuum that emerged after the coalition chased away the local pro-Saddam municipal leaders.
In towns such as Safwan, local police and government officials — closely linked to Mr. Hussein's regime — have fled. They have not been replaced, and it is increasingly clear that the coalition forces cannot provide law and order in those towns. British soldiers estimate that between 80 and 90 per cent of Iraqi civilians have guns in their homes.
Nor is there any sign of a humanitarian operation to bring food and water to the newly captured towns, where many people were killed or injured in the coalition's assault. In Safwan, impoverished families are begging the British soldiers to provide medical care for sick children and relatives who were injured in the early bombardments of the war.
The chaotic conditions also forced our convoy of journalists to withdraw from Iraq. We were one of the last remaining groups of independent journalists in the south.
When I first arrived in Safwan on the weekend, journalists could seek shelter at a British military post at a key highway intersection on the outskirts of the town, which had been captured by Anglo-American forces last Friday. The British troops promised to take care of us.
But after we fled on Sunday night to escape the threat of an attack by the local Iraqi gunmen, we found a completely different situation in Safwan when we returned this morning.
We discovered that the British soldiers had abandoned the highway post and closed the main route to Kuwait. We were told that the only safe place in the region was a small British command post, several kilometres west of Safwan.
From there, when the border reopened, we were finally able to speed across the border to safety in Kuwait.
