Posted on 12/01/2003 6:45:27 PM PST by BlackVeil
The centre of the Iraqi town of Samarra has been devastated after ambushes of US troops sparked a massive response in which the military claimed 54 insurgents killed, but the only bodies were of eight civilians, according to the local hospital.
Elsewhere in Iraq, a US soldier died of wounds he sustained when Iraqi gunmen attacked an army convoy on Monday near Habbaniyah, west of Baghdad, the US military said, taking the toll in combat in the past seven months to 187.
Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the US-led coalition's deputy director of operations in Iraq, said in Baghdad after Sunday's attacks, "There were 54 estimated killed, 22 estimated wounded and one confirmed in detention". But he admitted the toll for Samarra was based on troop debriefings, saying, "The reports that we have are from initial battlefield reports."
Challenged about what had happened to the bodies of the 54 militants said to have been killed, Brigadier General Kimmitt 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, he insisted: "We have no such reports whether from medical authorities or police. "We don't have any reports of collateral damage or killing or wounding of innocent civilians. If we get these reports, they will be included in the investigation."
Brigadier General Kimmitt defended the intensity of the response to the attacks on two heavily armed convoys taking new dinar notes to two local banks and another convoy of engineers from the 93 troops, who had riposted with tank cannon-fire in a heavily built-up area.
"There were soldiers being fired at. Our soldiers were performing a mission."
The general acknowledged that the one insurgent now confirmed in custody was a sharp reduction on the 11 claimed captured by the commanding colonel in Samarra earlier in the day.
"Some of those early reports might have been a bit off," he said.
Brigadier General Kimmitt also sought to play down earlier reports that many of the attackers wore the uniforms of the disbanded Saddam Fedayeen militia of the ousted regime.
In Sammara, Captain Andy Deponai said the attacking force had been split into two groups of "anything from 30 to 40 individuals at each bank site".
"They split down to team- and squad-size elements so they could attack from all sides," he said. "They had pre-prepared explosives and improvised explosives on our route which we took into the city."
Colonel Fredrick Rudesheim, commander of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, vowed to "continue to take the fight to this enemy," slamming as "disinformation" charges by Iraqi police, hospital and municipal officials in Samarra that his troops fired indiscriminately.
Samarra's police chief, Colonel Ismail Mahmud Mohammed, said the guerrillas who attacked the US forces, wounding five soldiers and a civilian according to a US toll, had withdrawn by the time the Americans returned fire.
Anguished residents, including middle-aged men, could be seen hugging each other in grief after the carnage on the streets, which tribal leaders warned would only increase support for Washington's foes in the mainly Sunni Muslim town.
Graffiti expressing support for the ousted Sunni-dominated regime of Saddam Hussein covered the walls of the city after the prolonged bombardments. -- AFP
"Some of those early reports might have been a bit off," he said.
Everything seems to have been increased by a factor of ten. But that is typical of war news.
As soon as I saw the headline yesterday, I knew in 24 hours we would be accused of killing "innocent civilians," blah, blah, blah.
Screw 'em.
Brigadier General Kimmitt also sought to play down earlier reports that many of the attackers wore the uniforms of the disbanded Saddam Fedayeen militia of the ousted regime.
There was an announcement that they had been dressed in black Fedayeen clothes. AlJezeera is claiming that a bus load of Iranian pilgrims got shot up. It is possible that they were there, because Samarra is the site of an important Shia shrine (to the occultation of the Twelfth Imam).
The Iranian pilgrims like to go dressed in black. Witnesses were waving around what were allegedly identity cards of Iranians. Time will tell.
I'm beginning to think that Chalabi was right: we may need to treat some areas as the British did in the Boer War, and simply put all of them in internment camps until a new Iraqi government is firmly in place.
I'm not advocating killing them, but almost all I'm reading from Iraqis is that we're too soft on these guys.
One of the problems here is the media is getting inside the normal loop of how the military operates and then raising questions later about why discrepencies were earlier reported. It's not really fair to the military and I wish the military wouldn't release too much info before they have the situation properly sussed themselves because they only open themselves up to this bickering and parsing about "what was said earlier".
After an action like this, there will be all sorts of reports coming from guys on the ground. They're all going to be perceiving the situation in different ways. A grunt reports to his squad leader. The various squad leaders tell their platoon leaders what they were seeing. The platoon leader makes a report to the next higher up and so forth and so on. The one collating all these reports is going to get a wide variety of different "intel" in this fashion with which he must construct a picture of what happened. This is how it works. Queries might be bounced back down the chain to the on-the-ground guys for further clarification- and so forth and so on. It's not an instantaneous process of "this is what happened".
When the media gets inside this loop and tries to derive an accurate picture of what happens before the military itself has done so, they aren't really doing anybody any great service- not the American people, not the military, not the media's role as "conduit of reality".
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