I'm sure we could have thought of a way to deal with the bodies. Hogs ARE omnivorous..
Posted on 12/01/2003 4:02:05 PM PST by TexKat
SAMARRA, Iraq (AFP) - The US military said it believed 54 insurgents were killed in intense exchanges in the northern Iraqi town of Samarra the previous day but commanders admitted they had no bodies.
The only corpses at the city's hospital were those of ordinary civilians, including two elderly Iranian pilgrims and a child.
US Brigadier General Mark Kimmit told a Baghdad press conference that 54 militants had been gunned down, 22 wounded and one arrested.
But challenged about what had happened to the bodies, Kimmit said: "I would suspect that the enemy would have carried them away and brought them back to where their initial base was."
Asked about reports from senior police and hospital officials in the town of eight civilians killed and dozens more wounded, the US general insisted: "We have no such reports whether from medical authorities or police.
A few hours earlier, Colonel Fredrick Rudesheim, who heads the 3rd Combat Brigades that was involved in Sunday's bloody clashes, told reporters that his troops had killed 46 and captured another 11.
"Are you asking me to produce (them)?" he asked, when questioned by reporters about the absence of any militants' bodies at Samarra's single hospital or on the city's streets.
"This is a good question and I think perhaps if you can interview the Fedayeen (a disbanded militia of Saddam Hussein's ousted regime) or whoever attacked us, you might get a better answer."
Lieutenant Colonel Ryan Gonsalves, who commands the 166th Armored Battalion in Samarra, also said his troops were not in possession of the bodies.
The death toll, he said, "is based on the reports we got from the ground."
Lieutenant Joseph Marcee, who took part in Sunday's combat, said he saw several of the attackers lying dead on the ground.
"There was no time to pick up the bodies. We were receiving fire from other locations," he said.
Sergeant Nicholas Mullen, who fired rounds from an Abrams tank Sunday, offered yet another explanation for the army's inability to locate the corpses. "We don't stick around," he said.
The mystery, which borders on solving a mathematics equation, further deepened with Gonsalves' report.
According to him, a total of 60 militants, divided into two groups, attacked two convoys escorting new Iraqi currency to banks in the city.
Another four assailants in a BMW attacked a separate engineering convoy.
If the US troops killed 46 and captured 11 of them, only three of the survivors would have been left to pick up the corpses.
On Kimmit's figures the calculus becomes even hazier -- with 54 killed, 22 wounded and one captured, 13 militants remain unaccounted for, although both commanders did say the cash convoys also came under attack on their way in and out of the city.
As to how the troops came up with their casualty figures, Rudesheim said it was by counting their weapons.
"We don't indiscriminately engage people, only those who engage us with AK 47s and RPGs. That's how we determine the number of people we are engaging and, after talking with each soldier, we can tell just how many people are returning fire at us."
Residents in Samarra said they had not seen any of the militants' bodies, 46 or 54.
The head of the local hospital, Abed Tawfiq, reported eight dead civilians but no insurgents.
Ambulance driver Abdelmoneim Mohammed said he had not ferried any combattants wounded or killed and wearing the black Fedayeen outfit which US soldiers said their assailants wore.
"If I had seen bodies, I would have picked them up. It's not like the Americans would have done it.
"If the death toll had reached that announced by the Americans, the atmosphere in Samarra would be quite different."
Salaheddin Mawlud, a colonel in the former Iraqi army, who now heads Samarra city council's complaints office, said the American toll does not work.
"If there had been so many dead, we would have seen people rushing to the hospital, the police station or here, and it just didn't happen."
Abdelrizek Jadwa, who owns a grocery 50 meters (yards) from the scene of one of the attacks, said he did not have the shadow of a doubt.
"After the firing, I went out of my shop. There were no wounded, no killed on the streets. Where could they have disappeared?"
I also heard this being reported on Fox News this evening.
I'm sure we could have thought of a way to deal with the bodies. Hogs ARE omnivorous..
Maybe that's the only way to keep marauders at bay. Scare 'em to death of visions of being knocked senseless and tortured.
Either that, or some sharp commander was giving two cans of beer for every reported kill.
What's that you say, there's no beer allowed in country? Okey-fine; no beer, no bodies....
-archy-/-
How hard can it be to round up 54 replacement bodies? Heck, why not "find" 500 more just to be sure. They all look the same.
Or course a fire fight which results in 40 or 50 dead is a major deal and pretty chaotic, I'm sure. I'm probably missing something here.
Seriously, folks, it's a desert. 50 guys getting heavily blasted and plowed over by M1A1s and Bradleys aren't going to leave enough to fit in a Ziploc bag. The sand can easily cover what's left over.
Now, I agree that it is kind of amatuerish to make a claim like that to the press. We haven't been giving out enemy casualty information thus far, even when we had the bodies.
"What enemy action? Shooting, explosions? Yes, there was some shooting and explosions. Enemy dead? We vaped SOMETHING, but we didn't get a good look at it."
Step 1. Paint one of these OD, and get a Humvee to tow it behind.
Step2. Hose it out good afterward.
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