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?"
Oh, I don't know that it'd necessarily have to be DEADwood....
Come to think of it, there's supposedly one already around that Saddam used for just that purpose. Nothing like continuing his old traditions for those so eager to do his bidding, right>
-archy-/-
Judging from the article, it is possible that Saddam himself led this attack, was killed, and his body was carried away by the surviving attackers. I might have thought that our forces would be more interested in identifying whether any of the killed were among those who were being sought.
The only reason I can see for leaving enemy dead to the enemy is tactical inferiority. If some US commander is responsible for the reporting which led to this falsely specific article, then he has made us look like fools.
If we really did kill 54 and failed to recover any bodies then we are fools.
Staff Sgt. Bruce Jones
Staff sergeant: Samarra battle was 'extremely scary' 'I kept thinking about my wife and my son'
(CNN) -- U.S. forces responded Sunday to simultaneous ambushes on convoys in northern Iraq with heavy firepower, killing at least 46 attackers, according to military officials. No Americans were killed in the gunfights, which took place in Samarra, about 75 miles north of Baghdad.
Staff Sgt. Bruce Jones described the intense battle Monday from Samarra to CNN anchor Soledad O'Brien.
JONES: My mission and my platoon's mission was to actually escort the Iraqi currency exchange into two different banks in Samarra. ...
We escorted them in. As soon as we got to that location, we started receiving direct fire via small arms, AK-47s. My guys from both the east and the west bank started returning fire back to the point of origin and neutralizing any targets they'd actually seen.
During the course of the firefight, we started receiving not only small-arms [fire]. We had incoming and direct fire from mortars. We also had RPGs coming through here just hitting us all around.
As far as my thoughts during that, it was -- it was an extremely scary time. I remember I talked to my wife yesterday morning. I've got a 10-month-old son. He'll be 10 months old on the fourth of February, the fourth of December, excuse me. And she told me, she said, 'Don't do anything stupid. Don't put yourself in any harm's way or anything like that. Just be extremely careful.'
And I reckoned during the course of that fight, we were -- I kept thinking about my wife and my son. And I kept communicating with my team that I had with me and I was looking at the rest of the squad that was there and making sure they were doing their job. They were all well. They were doing an excellent job as far as returning fire and everything. And I, you know, was saying a little bit of prayer while I was in the middle of it. I was talking to the man upstairs, saying, 'God, please keep us safe,' and putting some rounds down the range. ...
O'BRIEN: Give me a sense of how long this firefight lasted and what kind of firepower U.S. troops used to return fire.
JONES: [M]y understanding is it was only supposed to take us about 30 minutes in the actual Iraqi currency exchange, to drop off the money. And I estimated that about an hour and a half, two hours, is what I would just estimate. The firepower that the U.S. had, as far as we had some tanks out there. We had some Bradleys. I had an MP squad with me and I had another one at the other bank. We were using 40-millimeter machine guns. We were also using our regular M-4 rifles and 249 SAWs plus some 50-caliber machine guns.
O'BRIEN: Tell me a little bit about any civilians. I heard and read that there was a barricade blocking off the streets. Did it seem to you that there were no civilians around? Did that seem surprising to you?
JONES: Well, what they attempted to do -- and we don't know if it's actually civilians. I called them all terrorists. If they're blocking the streets or if they're attempting to block the streets, then obviously they're not a civilian. They're some sort of combatant. They're helping out the terrorist projects with that. I'm a true believer of that. These guys were trying to throw vehicles in the way, taxi cabs, a couple of white pickup trucks and everything, to actually block the roads as we tried to egress out with the convoy.
We did have to -- we did have to ram some vehicles out of the way to get our people out, to get our people out of there safely and securely. But civilians in the area, you know something's going to happen as soon as you get in there and all the civilians basically clear out of the way. So if you go into a street or part of the city that's normally busy and there's nobody around, you'd better get your guns up and ready to go. O'BRIEN: Before I let you go -- I know you said you spoke to your wife yesterday. You've got a 10-month-old son. While we've got you up on the satellite, anything you want to say to them? JONES: Yes. Mercedes, Nicholas, they're -- they're my heart and my soul right now. What I'm doing over here, I'm doing to protect the freedom and the future freedom of my son. And, you know, they're my driving force behind everything that I do.
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