Posted on 12/01/2003 4:56:31 PM PST by blam
Ferocious gun battle that left no bodies
(Filed: 02/12/2003)
Americans say 54 attackers died in the fiercest engagement since the war ended while Iraqis insist that eight civilians were killed by reckless US fire, writes Jack Fairweather
Wrecked cars and bullet-riddled shopfronts testified to the battle. But in the streets of Samarra yesterday there was little evidence of what the Americans described as the biggest engagement since the end of the Iraqi war.
Burned out cars following the fighting in Samarra, north of Baghdad
US forces insisted they had killed 54 Iraqi attackers after two of their armoured convoys came under co-ordinated attack while delivering new currency to local banks on Sunday. But local people and a hospital doctor reported only eight dead, who they insisted were mainly civilians, including an Iranian pilgrim.
It was impossible to reconcile the two versions of the battle. The US military acknowledged that the death toll was estimated - rather than confirmed - on the debriefings of soldiers and no bodies had been collected.
The firefight began at 1.20pm on Sunday when the convoys entered the city from separate locations carrying money for a currency exchange programme. Following a previous withdrawal agreement by US forces, they were the first coalition vehicles to enter the city centre in over a week.
Following recent attacks, the convoy's jeeps and humvees were escorted by tanks and armoured personnel carriers.
Their caution proved well-founded. One convoy was hit by a roadside bomb shortly after entering the town, Iraqi witnesses said, although it went on to the bank.
At 1.30pm, soldiers began delivering three billion Iraqi dinars (more than £100,000) of new currency to the Rafidain bank in the town centre. A cordon of tanks and soldiers on rooftops were on alert.
As both convoys prepared to leave, the Fedayeen, a militia formed by Saddam Hussein, attacked with rocket-propelled grenades, mortar and small arms fire from other rooftops.
At the second bank on the edge of the commercial district, insurgents leapt from cover firing rockets, a witness said. A spokesman for the 4th Infantry Division said: "American soldiers were struck by heavy and sustained fire from separate locations. US soldiers returned fire and the attackers were overwhelmed."
The attacks lasted less than 20 minutes, with troops rapidly supported by four Apache attack helicopters. The US military said that two teams of up to 30 fedayeen were involved.
Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, a US military spokesman, said one person was detained.
Asked about the bodies of the 54 militants said to have been killed, he said: "I would suspect that the enemy would have carried them away and brought them back to where their initial base was."
Though the attack was repulsed, US officers said it marked a new stage in the insurgency, showing greater levels of co-ordination.
Captain Andy Deponai, whose tank was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG), said: "Up to now you've seen a progression. Initially, it was hit and run, single RPG shots on patrols, then they started doing volley fire, multiple RPG ambushes, and now this is the first well co-ordinated one.
"Here it seems they had the training to stand and fight."
On the streets of Samarra yesterday shoppers were out in force and the US military had retreated again. At the Rafidain bank, the firefight had left several wrecked cars, a smattering of bullet holes in shopfronts and one building damaged by small arms fire.
Down a narrow side alley facing the bank stood three wrecked cars, two struck by tank rounds, the third dotted with bullet holes. There was no obvious sign that anyone had been in the vehicles.
Omar Mehdi, a 27-year-old teacher who lives in the street, said he had parked the car there 30 minutes before the attack.
His father forlornly held up the burnt cinders of a copy of the Koran that had been on the dashboard of the car. "No one was killed in the car, thank God," he said.
Outside the mosque that stands at one end of the street, a tank round had landed on a Mitsubishi car. According to Iraqis an Iranian pilgrim and two other people were killed.
"We heard the shooting and everyone began running, there was a terrible traffic jam and people were desperately trying to get out of their cars to escape," said one local shopkeeper.
At the scene of the second attack, a clothes shop two hundred yards away had been burnt out, although no one was injured. Two nearby buildings had also been targeted by American tank gunners.
The attacks had left an ugly mood in the town, where locals were unanimous in condemning indiscriminate firing by the Americans.
"They are the most malicious people. They are not educated, they are barbarians. They said they would bring us democracy but they scare women and children. We will resist them to the depth of our soul," said Rashid Jasem, 38, a hardware shop owner, whose store was peppered with bullet holes.
Iraqi witnesses claimed that tanks fired a round at workers from a drug factory as they left work at 2.00pm. One woman was killed and 18 injured. A crater from the shell and a pool of blood remained nearby.
They said four cars were also hit in the parking area of the hospital and a nearby mosque was shelled, killing two. Dr Faleh Hassan Asamara, on duty at the hospital, said: "The Americans have done a lot of shooting but I don't think the number of dead they claimed were killed."
Have some more Kool Aid...
-PJ
Blowing away entire streets and empty buildings sure is a winning strategy. Now why on earth aren't the Iraqis so happy that we're there again? (sarcasm off)
.... so we decided to believe the Iraqi's.
I don't understand how any of the enemy got out alive much less how they were able to retrieve their dead. Don't we attack into the ambush? We should be walking over the dead bodies and checking their pockets and stuff. With 4 Apache's overhead ... I don't understand.
By Phil Reeves in Samara
02 December 2003
Independent UK
To Ali Abdullah Amin, the accusations and denials that were yesterday flying about the latest battle between the occupiers and occupied of Iraq - the fiercest engagement, some say, since the early days of the US-led invasion - were irrelevant.
He was not interested in whether the American military was telling the truth when it said that its troops had killed 54 "attackers" - shorthand for Iraqi guerrillas who carried out a double ambush against a US convoy in the Sunni town of Samarra on Sunday which turned into a running fire fight.
Nor was he wondering about the denials made by Iraqi hospital officials and policemen, in the face of what the Americans have presented as a crushing defeat for the pro-Saddamists, Baathists, ex-soldiers and other fighters who are violently opposing their presence.
Iraqi officials say only eight people died, including a 71-year-old Iranian pilgrim called Fathollah Hejazi, whose charred passport they were showing to all-comers. The old man had, it seems, come to visit the ancient gold-domed Shi'ite mosque in this once-peaceful town on the banks of the Tigris.
Ali Abdullah Amin was interested in none of these things. What he cared about, as he lay beneath a grubby yellow blanket in his hospital bed, was the pain in his bandaged legs, both of which were seeping blood from bullet wounds, and the hole in the left side of his stomach. "My legs hurt, my legs hurt," the little boy moaned, as he cried in the arms of his 22-year-old cousin, Jamal Karim.
He may also have been wondering about the whereabouts of his father, Abdullah Amin al-Kurdi. Father and son were shot outside a small nearby mosque, a spot now marked by a large congealed pool of blood. Father didn't make it.
Iraqi witnesses were unanimous that Americans were to blame, pointing to a hole in a nearby cemetery wall which looked like the work of a shell fired from an Abrams tank. The US military stuck by its story of the battle, and by its estimation of the Iraqi death toll. Fifty-four Iraqis died, it said, all combatants. Major Gordon Tate, a spokesman at the headquarters of the 4th Infantry Division in Tikrit, insisted the US military was "confident" about its assessment of the "battle damage".
"Soldiers and commanders on the site counted," he told The Independent. "Every commander on the site is responsible for doing battle damage assessment. Part of that includes counting the dead and wounded on both sides."
Ali and his father appear to have slipped through the net. Even though the boy's hospital bed is only 10 minutes away from the US Army's base in Samarra, and although he was easily found by journalists, he does not appear to be part of the "battle damage assessment". Asked about wounded Iraqi civilians, Major Tate said he had no information on the subject.
As occupiers of Iraq, the US is responsible under international law for the safety of the civilians living under its rule. The senior US military commander, Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, said this weekend that his troops conduct follow-up visits to places where they have been involved in fighting. But Ali's cousin, Jamal Karim, speaking yesterday afternoon, said no US official had been to see him or the injured boy.
Nor, said Samarra's hospital information officer, Sa'id Hassan Ali al-Janabi, had any "coalition" officials come to see any of the others wounded on Sunday. Had they done so, they could have seen his list of the injured - 55 names, including five women. These were, he insisted, all civilians, some with light injuries but a few with wounds so critical that they had been moved to hospitals in Baghdad or Tikrit.
Had the same officials visited Samarra's streets they could also have heard many accounts of the battle that differed greatly from their own.
The US military says the ambushes began at 1.30pm when the 1st Battalion of the 66th Armoured Regiment, accompanied by US military police, came under attack from Iraqis on the east and west sides of Samarra. The guerrillas fired mortars, improvised explosives, rocket-propelled grenades and Kalashnikovs. The Americans replied by firing the 120mm cannon on their Abrams tanks, the smaller 25mm automatic cannon on their Bradley fighting vehicles, and an assortment of smallarms, mainly M-16 rifles and 9mm pistols.
The US military blamed members of Saddam Hussein's fedayeen paramilitary force. This appears to be based in part on the clothing of the dead, although it sounded like the apparel of many young Arabs.
Iraqis in Samarra told a different story. Some of their accounts were easily disprovable but there was consensus that the American troops fired randomly at times, and that there were no uniformed Iraqi fighters in their midst. Several detailed descriptions from Iraqis confirmed that guerrillas were also firing on the Americans, and that there were prolonged fire fights.
One businessman said that it was started when the Iraqis ambushed the Americans on the edge of town. Another, Mothana Mohammed Badie, a 32-year-old shopkeeper - said fighting erupted when US forces arrived to deliver some new Iraqi dinars to a local bank, a view which coincides with the American version.
He said he was in the area, but ran home to his wife and children only to have his house shot up by a volley of .50 bullets from a passing Abrams tank. Shortly afterwards he was joined by his father, Dr Mohammed Badie, the vice-president of Tikrit University.
Dr Badiecalled the fedayeen "terrorists". But, as he stood in his partially wrecked bullet-pocked front room, he appeared close to despair.
"All the people here are fed up and angry," he said. They want the Americans out of town ... They [the Americans] have to respect our feelings and traditions and customs, but we see the opposite. There is something here that is hidden from the American public. They call it 'Tha'ar' - revenge. That means that if anyone kills your friend, or your brother, you have to avenge it by killing an American soldier."
This is, in the clichés of journalism, called the cycle of violence. And the wheel is rotating with ever-increasing speed.
I hope we planted transmitters ...
Have we become too humane and respectful of civilians in how we wage war? These people don't know they've been beaten. At the end of WWII, the Germans and Japanese weren't taking pot shots at Americans because they had to avenge killings. They'd had enough of dying for doing that.
Which means these insurgents are very disciplined. Not leaving your dead and wounded on the battlefield is a cornerstone of military professionalism.
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