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Guardsmen in Iraq find bodies of Westerners

From AP and local reports

March 3, 2005

Guardsmen from Douglas County were among those who discovered shallow graves in the Iraqi desert last weekend containing four bodies, apparently of Westerners.

The bodies showed signs of having been executed, said Oregon Army National Guard spokesman Maj. Arnold Strong.

"They found a polo shirt that had eight bullet holes in the back and lots of bloodstains," Strong said in a telephone interview with The Oregonian from Taji Camp, an Army base north of Baghdad.

The remains, which were handed over to the Army Criminal Investigation Division and the FBI, have not been identified publicly.

Oregon soldiers believe they were from Western countries, Strong said, based on the condition of the teeth and clothing.

An Iraqi informant alerted the U.S. military to the location of the remains. The informant claimed to have seen the bodies in September in "fresher condition" and believed they either were American or British based on their clothing and hair color, Strong said.

Seven Americans, most working for civilian companies, and a handful of civilians from other Western countries appear on lists of missing foreigners in Iraq.

Oregon Guard soldiers, nearing the end of their tour in Iraq, were getting ready to leave the country.

The members of the Guard's 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry have been serving in Iraq for nearly a year. Their last deployment was to Yusifiya, just south of Baghdad.

"This was literally the last company mission," Strong said.

Led by Sgt. 1st Class Manuel Annear of Roseburg, the platoon spread out across the desert sand near the site.

"Sometimes these things are booby traps," Strong said.

Soon, they came across the remains. The graves yielded two intact skulls, remnants of two others, plus fragments of vertebrae and some rib bones.

The remains were put in plastic bags and taken to a nearby Marine base.

Roseburg resident Kristin Riley, wife of company commander Capt. Eric Riley, spoke to her husband earlier this week, but she had not heard of their latest operation.

However, she said her husband was still exulting in the success of a previous mission, in which they recovered some weapons in a local cemetery and rounded up several suspected insurgents.

"I think it was a kind of a boost, a morale booster for them to have their last mission come off as well as it did," said Riley, referring to the Yusifiya mission as a whole. "He was probably the most up that I've heard him in a long time."

Strong reports that the unit captured at least a half-dozen suspected enemy combatants on Feb. 22, including a suspected terrorist leader and two of his deputies. The men were among 124 military-aged men who were rounded up for questioning, with the others released later.

Hidden in a number of above-ground cement graves were weapons caches, reports Strong, including mortar rounds, anti-aircraft rounds, bombs, and the explosive components of roadside bombs.

The cemetery is near the Al Qaqaa ammunitions depot southwest of Baghdad where approximately 377 tons of explosives were reported missing sometime after U.S. forces arrived in 2003.

The munitions found in the graves were later destroyed.

"They were pretty excited about it," Riley said, quoting her husband as saying, "'Even though it was really dangerous, it was awesome.'"

Even so, Riley is glad her husband and his comrades are coming home later this month. She said the news that the Guard would be operating outside the relative safety of Baghdad was greeted with less enthusiasm on the families' part than it was on the soldiers'.

"I know that for the families back here it was kind of like a punch in the stomach," she said. "But for them it was the opposite ... it was an adrenaline rush.

"They were getting out of Baghdad where they'd been for the last 12 months," she added. "They felt like they were really doing something."