Posted on 06/26/2003 3:34:57 AM PDT by kattracks
Four of six British soldiers killed in a southern Iraqi town were executed after they surrendered following a fierce gun battle, British newspapers reported, as Prime Minister Tony Blair ruled out sending more troops to the country.
The British military policemen mounted a last stand Tuesday at a police station in Al-Majar Al-Kabir, around 200 kilometres (120 miles) north of Iraq's second city of Basra, and were killed, possibly with their own weapons, after they refused to flee, papers said.
Most British newspapers, which carried the story of the deaths on their front pages, said the sequence of events was still unclear.
The Times reported the British troops were said to have ordered a group of Iraqi civilians with them whom they had been training as police officers to flee.
"They told us to save ourselves though they refused to run away. They were murdered in cold blood. There was no way they could escape. I'm so ashamed I left them," The Times quoted Salam Mohammed, one of the trainees, as saying.
Ali al-Ateya, an Iraqi radio journalist, claimed that he saw the Britons offering to surrender their weapons after two of their colleagues had already been shot dead. But ringleaders snatched the rifles and killed the soldiers.
"They shot the British in the head, several times. The executioners were standing right in front of the Britons," he told The Times.
The military police team had come to the town to discuss uniforms for their trainees. They wanted local people to recognise the new police officers, who had been patrolling in civilian clothes, the paper added.
Residents of Al-Majar Al-Kabir, which during the war on Iraq was handed over to coalition forces without a shot being fired, were said to be angry that troops had started carrying out house searches for illegal weapons using dogs, which are considered unclean in Islam.
Witnesses told AFP that the Britons had killed four people in a firefight and injured 17 before being killed themselves.
The right-wing Daily Express ran pictures of the dead soldiers on its front page, under the headline: "Executed".
"Our boys made their last stand against a terrifying, hate filled mob in this bloody den of carnage," it added.
"No mercy" was the front page headline of the Daily Mail tabloid, which said the "hero soldiers (were) murdered in cold blood by an Iraqi mob".
Speaking in the House of Commons after Tuesday's incident Blair said the security situation was "still obviously serious."
But he said he was told earlier Wednesday by Chief of Defence Staff General Sir Michael Walker that commanders in Iraq felt they had enough troops on the ground.
He suggested that the incident might have resulted from attempts by British forces to disarm Iraqis around the town, which is midway between Baghdad and Iraq's second city, Basra.
"There had been problems in relation to that, and that may form part of the background to it but at the moment it is simply too early to say," Blair said.
The dead were the first British fatalities in Iraq since the war to overthrow Saddam was officially declared over on May 1.
The United Nations does not currently have the capacity to send a security force into Iraq, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said after talks in London with Blair.
Some residents said troops first opened fire on a crowd of angry demonstrators but the town's local council chief, Abu Maryam, said the first shots came from the crowd.
A senior British officer in Baghdad told AFP the killing of the Royal Military Police soldiers was not a sign of a general increase in local resistance or deteriorating security.
"In terms of whether it's a signpost to the future and what may happen, it's too early to say definitely, but the early indication is that it is not," he said on condition of anonymity.
But matters looked to be cooling down. Abu Maryam said town leaders had met with British troops who agreed to suspend searches in the town for two months, and both sides had agreed to formally apologise for the bloody incident.
Abu Maryam also blamed the shooting on members of the ousted Baath party.
The southern, predominantly Shiite Muslim sector of Iraq had been considered relatively stable, with reconstruction efforts well under way and no major clashes between coalition forces and local Iraqis since the end of the war.
The second-in-command of Iraq's main Shiite Muslim group, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, last week rejected attacks on coalition soldiers and called instead for "peaceful" resistance.
Speaking on BBC radio earlier, British Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon said an urgent review was underway into the security of British forces which control southern Iraq.
"Obviously, depending on the results of that review, we have more troops should that be required. We have significant forces available should it be necessary," he said.
Britain, the main US ally in the war, now has 12,000 troops in southern Iraq.
Blair also faced political heat Wednesday on whether one of his closest aides distorted intelligence about Saddam's weapons programmes in the countdown to war.
Blair's communications director, Alistair Campbell, testified he never sought to "sex up" a September 2002 dossier on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction.
Unnamed sources have told BBC radio that the 50-page document's sensational one-sentence claim that Iraq could deploy chemical or biological weapons in just 45 minutes was inserted under pressure from Downing Street to beef up the case for war.
Until now, the coalition forces have failed to locate Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction, raising questions over whether Blair and US President George W. Bush intentionally misled their publics in order to launch a war.
In more bad news for reconstruction, an explosion tore up an oil pipeline, linked to Baghdad's main oil refinery and power plant early Tuesday in the Barwaneh region 250 kilometers (155 miles) northwest of the capital.
Meanwhile, the US overseer in Iraq, Paul Bremer, blamed members of Saddam Hussein's banned Baath party for the sabotage that he said was responsible for what are now two days without electrical power in Baghdad.
Iraq's Northern Oil Co. said the latest attack a day earlier targeted an oil pipeline northwest of Baghdad that supplies a refinery and a power plant in the capital.
Dispute Over Market Patrol Escalated Into Siege
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Washington Post Foreign Service
MAJAR AL-KABIR, Iraq, June 25 -- The attack on British forces here that killed six soldiers Tuesday was carried out by a mob of Iraqis enraged that paratroops had sought to patrol the town's market, witnesses and local officials said today.
After a seemingly prosaic dispute escalated into a two-hour firefight, witnesses said, hundreds of Iraqis armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers laid an Alamo-like siege to a police station where British forces were holed up, killing at least four soldiers at close range when their ammunition ran out.
"Almost the whole city was outside," said Ahmed Hassan, a police trainee who was inside the station but escaped through a side window. "It was not a small attack. It was like a war."
The clash was the most intense resistance U.S. and British forces have faced since President Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq on May 1.
Unlike recent fatal assaults on U.S. troops in restive central Iraq, which American officials have blamed on fighters loyal to Saddam Hussein, the siege at the police station in this small southeastern town did not appear to have been connected to the former president's supporters. Instead, residents and officials said, it was motivated by a growing anger at the foreign occupation of Iraq among people who just 10 weeks ago welcomed the fall of Hussein's government, raising concerns among U.S. and British officials that resistance activity may be broadening into areas they assumed were pacified.
In Majar al-Kabir and nearby towns, where local Shiite Muslim militias chased out Hussein's Baath Party government before invading troops arrived, British soldiers had adopted a low profile, refraining from shows of force and making relatively few trips into populated areas. But orders to confiscate banned weapons, such as rocket-propelled grenades, led them to intensify searches of private homes, which many residents contend have been conducted in ways that violate conservative local customs. The Iraqis' rage has been compounded by what they regard as insufficient progress by the United States and Britain in addressing the economic disruption and lack of basic services that followed the war.
"We freed our city. We kicked out the Baathists," said Talal Ahmed, 31, a shopkeeper who was appointed to speak on behalf of several local police officers and government officials. "The British did not free our city. We don't need them."
What do you mean "we" Kemosabe?
Ahmed and other residents said Tuesday's violent confrontation in this town 230 miles southeast of Baghdad began with a seemingly routine military patrol through the town's market, two perpendicular streets crowded with vegetable stands and shops.
Irate residents began shouting at the red-bereted paratroops. Rocks were thrown and, according to witnesses, an Iraqi fired at least one shot into the air. The British returned fire, first with rubber bullets and then with live ammunition, witnesses said.
"It was a situation that seemed to rise out of nothing and become very volatile," said Lt. Col. Ronnie McCourt, the spokesman for British forces in southern Iraq.
The confrontation became so intense, witnesses said, that the paratroops retreated down the main street under a hail of gunfire, returning fire as they moved. Although reinforcements arrived and the paratroops were extracted, a dual-rotor Chinook helicopter was hit with a rocket-propelled grenade as an armed throng converged upon the British evacuation point from several directions, the witnesses said.
"The people were shooting at them from everywhere," said Ahmed Fartosi, 37, an administrator at a humanitarian aid center who observed the battle. "The street was like hell. There were bullets everywhere. It was just like a war."
British military officials said seven soldiers in the helicopter were injured as well as one paratrooper on the ground.
Four Iraqis were killed and about a dozen injured, according to a nurse at the local hospital.
Either during that clash or shortly after, residents said dozens of people armed with AK-47 assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers besieged the town's police station, about a quarter-mile from the market, where six members of the British Royal Military Police were inside training members of the town's new police force. The attackers shouted for the British police to drop their weapons and leave the building, which they refused to do, Hassan said. When the attackers began firing at the concrete-and-brick building, he said, the British fired back through windows and from the roof.
The Iraqis inside the compound quickly pried the bars off a side window and fled the compound, Hassan said. He and others who witnessed the gun battle said it lasted for about two hours, until the British soldiers ran out of ammunition. At that point, Hassan and others said, the mob rushed into the compound and killed the soldiers.
"They kept fighting and fighting until they had no more bullets," said Samir Mohammed, a teacher who said he watched the exchange of fire.
Some witnesses and Iraqi police officers who entered the station after the shooting said they found the bodies of four British soldiers. They said two others were killed several hundred yards away, at an agricultural school. But others in the town said all six soldiers were killed inside the police station.
British military officials said they were still investigating the incident and could not specify where the killings occurred.
Evidence at the station appeared consistent with accounts that at least some of the soldiers were killed from inside the building. Several bullet holes in interior walls appeared to have resulted from gunfire originating from an inner courtyard. Bloodstains on the floor suggested at least one soldier was killed in a hallway.
"They were murdered," McCourt said. He called the attack "unprovoked."
It was not immediately clear why the reinforcements sent to evacuate the paratroops did not also extract the military police officers. Local officials said British military police, who had been visiting the station regularly, did not appear to coordinate with the paratroops, who were making their first venture into the market. And once the police came under fire, they were unable to call for help because their radios were in their Land Rovers, which were parked in front of the compound, Hassan said.
Although McCourt insisted that British commanders "knew where our forces were," he said military officials still did not know "the relation between the two events or the sequence of the two events."
But people in Majar al-Kabir, situated in a swath of fertile farmland fed by tributaries of the Tigris River, said the two incidents were closely related. They said the people in the market were furious at the presence of the paratroops because the town's leaders had just signed an agreement with a British officer under which local authorities would collect banned weapons in exchange for a commitment that British troops refrain from house-to-house searches for two months.
The agreement had been reached Monday after a dispute over searches in a nearby village on Sunday led to protests here. Some villagers alleged that soldiers had behaved rudely and killed a few of their animals. To quell their anger, Karim Mahoud, a former anti-Hussein guerrilla fighter who had been empowered by the British to police the local population, promised to have his men search for weapons and hand them over.
Ahmed, the town spokesman, insisted the British violated the agreement by trying to patrol the market. "They broke the deal," he said. "They went inside the market with the guns in a way that upset people."
McCourt acknowledged the existence of the agreement but said it did not prohibit British forces from conducting patrols. He also insisted that all searches are "conducted in such a way as to avoid infringing Arab religious and cultural sensibilities."
In Majar al-Kabir, though, the dispute over searches is wrapped in a larger debate over the very presence of British troops in the area. Many in the town, long a center of resistance to Hussein's government and the target of security operations under his rule, contend that because Mahoud's militia took control of the area before British forces arrived, they should be allowed to look after their own affairs.
"If the British want to be in Iraq, that's fine," said Ali Abbas, 46, the owner of a small shop in the market. "But let them stay outside of our city."
Ahmed said British officers had given town leaders a 48-hour ultimatum to hand over those responsible for the shooting, although British officials denied that such an order was issued.
Although several tribal sheiks visited a nearby British base to offer condolences this afternoon, there was little regret or sympathy among the young men milling about the gutted police station or several other municipal buildings.
"What happened at the police station was not spontaneous," Ahmed insisted. "It happened after we asked them to leave. If they had left, this would not have happened."
As several men surrounding him nodded in agreement, Ahmed continued: "We don't want to kill them. But if they come to search our homes, to invade our city, this will be our reaction."
Your gross under-reaction will just encourage more rags to behave badly.
Until the Baath party members and the Sunni terrorists are hunted down and eliminated, murders like these will probably continue.
This is the kind of thing they (used to?) make folk songs about.
"...If your officer's dead and the sergeants look white,
Remember it's ruin to run from a fight:
So take open order, lie down, and sit tight,
And wait for supports like a soldier.
Wait, wait, wait like a soldier . . .
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
So-oldier of the Queen!
- R. Kipling, "The Young British Soldier"
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