Posted on 12/04/2003 4:07:37 PM PST by Pan_Yans Wife
The US army came under renewed pressure on Wednesday over its conduct in a battle at the weekend in the central Iraqi town of Samarra, as Iran's senior religious leader accused the American forces of "a savage massacre" in which 54 locals were reportedly killed.
The battle, in which US forces attempting to deliver new Iraqi currency to two Samarran banks were ambushed by a small force of insurgents - said by US officials to have been dressed as fighters from Saddam Hussein's fedayeen militia - has led to wildly differing accounts from American military officials and local witnesses.
Hospital officials in Samarra said only eight people were killed, all of them civilians, including one Iranian pilgrim. Samarra is the burial place of two of Shia Islam's most revered imams.
Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for coalition forces in Iraq, said he had spoken about the incident on Wednesday to the commander of the division responsible for security in central Iraq, Major General Ray Odierno, but that no investigation had been sought. "He, at this point, believes he has been given the full truth but wants to close out any questions out there," Brig Gen Kimmitt said.
Saadun Isawi, a police official at Samarra hospital, said the facility had received 54 wounded and that the dead included a 73-year-old Iranian pilgrim to the Imam Hadi shrine, a 10-year-old boy and a female employee at Samarra pharmaceutical plant.
Asked about the discrepancy in the numbers of dead, Brig Gen Kimmitt, who said the figure of 54 killed had been arrived at after debriefing troops involved in the action, added: "I can't imagine why the enemy would want to bring a dead body to a hospital."
US officials were at pains to point out that any Iraqi deaths came only after American troops had been ambushed and that the incident had not been instigated as part of the coalition's recently stepped-up offensive operations. They also said conflicting accounts often existed of firefights but that the first rendition from US soldiers engaged in an attack was usually borne out in final reporting. "I trust the reports of my soldiers," said Brig Gen Kimmitt. "The people that attacked those trucks were attacking not only coalition soldiers but were attacking Iraqis trying to provide money for a restored, restabilised, rebuilt Iraq."
According to the official Iranian news agency, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, said "the brutal and arrogant occupiers" had "desecrated" a holy Islamic site. Both the outer perimeter walls of the al-Hadi shrine complex, and the mirrors of the shrine itself were scarred by bullets but it was not clear who had fired them. Locals claimed US soldiers had fired indiscriminately at attackers and civilians alike; an American military official acknowledged that munitions used in the engagement could easily have passed through walls behind combatants.
No wonder the shrine was "desecrated". There were gunmen all over it.
Hmmmmm. What was an Iranian "pilgrim" doing in a deserted city square? "Hey Al, al qaida!"
"Holy" and "islamic" in the same sentence?
At best, an oxymoron. More accurately, blasphemous. Satanic. Paganism is "holy". Welcome to the post-Christian world.
On his way home from Thanksgiving, no doubt. Oh well, they do say it's one of the most dangerous times to travel...
About all I needed to read about this...
At this moment, that is a long stretch.
Because we have so few people in Iraq, our small numbers must take drastic action.
When we should have many, many, small patrols in the boonies, working with the locals --- boonies being the bush, as well as the tight streets.
We need a whole lot of people to cover the territory.
Iraq can neither be freed nor tamed from the turret of an M1 tank.
Actually they would have and that is why news about these intentional civilian killing bombings was suppressed in our media completely at the time. Our WWII wartime propaganda on our Bombers stressed how they only went after "military" targets while a huge debate raged within the Army Airforce and our government on wether "morale" bombing against civilians was effective or did it create more hostility and even more resistance? The answer is yes- such targeting of civilians actually stiffened German Wermacht resistance against our troops in the final months of the war and most likely got a lot of our troops killed. Not to mention the countless airmen ripped to shreds upon landing in their parachutes by enraged German civilians (actually even French, Dutch, Belgian, and Italian civilians were said to have killed American bombers crew who parachuted into areas in which large numbers of civilians had been killed by our bombs).
By the way. Goebbels called our bombing of civilian targets "terror bombing". We called it "morale bombing"? Whose term is more accurate in light of recent events?
As to this story? Fog of war. Who knows what happened but I highly doubt American troops killed civilians intentionally. I also highly doubt we killed 46 to 54 insurgents in that fight either since we don't have one body to back it up. Unless some new info has emerged.
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