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Lessons of a bloody Sunday in
Samarra
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - On one point, all sources appear to
agree: what happened in the northern Sunni town of
Samarra two Sundays ago could tell us a great deal about
whether United States forces are likely to succeed or
fail in pacifying and stabilizing Iraq.
That
there was a three-hour battle between US soldiers and
Iraqis is also not in question. The problem is that
everything else about events is. The lack of agreement
about the "Battle of Samarra", as well its obvious
importance in gauging how the occupation is going, has
already provoked a flurry of analysis both in the
mainstream media and on Internet websites.
The
military at first claimed US forces had killed no less
than 46 of the paramilitary Fedayeen, identifiable,
apparently, from their black uniforms and checkered
khafiyas, or head scarves. That toll rose to 54
within hours after debriefings of each unit.
Press officers claimed that the battle began
when two convoys entering the city from opposite sides
were ambushed by more than 60 Fedayeen who lay in wait
for them at either end of the city. The convoys, which
included Bradley fighting vehicles and Abrams tanks,
were delivering new dinars to a bank located in the
center of town, and the fighting raged through the
streets and alleys of the city all the way in and all
the way out.
Eleven prisoners were taken, they
insisted, while, on the US side, only five of the 100
soldiers involved in the battle were wounded. US
military officers were understandably jubilant, claiming
a "significant victory" - indeed, in terms of body
counts, probably the most significant since President
George W Bush announced an end to major hostilities in
Iraq on May 1.
"They got whacked, and won't try
that again," a senior military official at the Pentagon
told the New York Times triumphantly, or, as the vice
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine General
Peter Pace, told a North Atlantic Treaty Organization
meeting in Brussels, "They attacked, and they were
killed. I think it will be instructive to them."
War enthusiasts back home, meanwhile, told
reporters that the battle demonstrated the desperation
of the guerrillas. The fact that so many were involved
in what was so clearly intended to be a bank heist
showed they were running short of money to fund the
resistance, and possibly of men, too.
Other
analysts who accepted the basic outlines of the
military's version of events came to more worrisome
conclusions: the number and mobility the guerrillas
showed in the fighting suggested they had reached a new
level of organization, sophistication and recruitment,
while their uniforms bespoke a growing confidence, and
their apparent knowledge of when and how the money was
to be delivered meant that their intelligence remains
light years ahead of the occupation's.
But when
reporters began swarming to Samarra - some roused from
their beds by eager military press officers - the scene
was not as they had expected. Nor were the accounts of
the townspeople, and, after a day of interviews, an
entirely different picture of the Sunday battle emerged.
Doctors and hospital staff reported only eight
Iraqi dead, including one or two elderly pilgrims from
Iran, a child, a mentally disabled man who was sitting
in a taxi, and a woman leaving the drug factory where
she worked. The hospital said that it had treated a
total of 54 people for wounds.
Indeed,
townspeople interviewed by name described the "battle"
more as indiscriminate firing from the tanks and other
armored vehicles, and random shooting by US soldiers,
much of it in the densely populated city center, while
"dozens of guerrillas" moved around the city taking pot
shots at the US troops at will.
"Luckily we
evacuated the kindergarten five minutes before we came
under attack," said Ibrahim Jassim, a guard interviewed
by the London Guardian. "Why did they attack randomly?
Why did they shoot a kindergarten with shells?"
Worse, according to accounts provided by some
sources to the Washington Post, the Iraqi resistance
grew larger as men rushed home to get their firearms to
join in the fighting. The military explained the
discrepancy in the body counts by suggesting that the
guerrillas' bodies had been carried away and secretly
buried by their comrades, an assertion for which
reporters there could find no evidence,either at the
city cemetery or anywhere else.
Justin Raimondo,
a writer at antiwar.com, a website that opposes the
occupation, also did a quick calculation, suggesting
that the military's explanation did not add up. "We are
told that a total of 60 insurgents ambushed those
convoys, but if US troops killed 54 and captured 11,
that leaves five insurgents to carry away the dead."
Nonetheless, General Mark Kimmit, the deputy
director for operations in Iraq, insisted that the 54
Iraqi guerrillas killed was accurate, although he also
confirmed that, instead of 11 Fedayeen captured, only
one was in fact in US custody.
Of course, the
disparity between the two accounts could be attributed
to the legendary "fog of war". But the gap was so large
that the media were already raising questions about that
dreaded Vietnam-era expression, "credibility",
particularly, as pointed out by the Los Angeles Times,
and Tom Engelhardt of tomdispatch.com, with respect to
the inflated body counts that came to encapsulate the
mendacity of the "Five O'Clock Follies in Saigon", as
the daily briefings during the Vietnam War were called.
Indeed, as if on cue, the Times reported last
week that "US military officials, in their regular news
briefings in Iraq, have quietly begun reporting
insurgent 'KIA', or killed in action, after months of
declining to detail the other side's losses."
More worrisome perhaps for the occupation's
prospects, however, was what the townspeople told
reporters about both the battle and their general
assessment of the occupiers. "Were the French happy
under the Nazis?" the US-appointed police chief in
Samarra asked the Financial Times after the battle. "It
is the same thing here."
Another policeman found
the military's contentions about guerrilla uniforms
incomprehensible. "These are just lies." he told
Knight-Ridder. "Everyone who was wearing a
kafiyeh was to them a Fedayeen. This is
ridiculous." Others interviewed by reporters had much
harsher words and vowed revenge for however many people
were killed and injured in the fighting.
It
seemed quite a contrast from what greeted US soldiers
when they first arrived in the city, as noted by
Raimondo, who dug out the following account from April.
"As soon as soldiers with the brigade's Infantry
Battalion had cleared the Ba'athist compound, taking
nine men into custody as possible regime sympathizers,
[Colonel Fred] Rudesheim found himself to be a popular
man in Samarra. All day long, men came, each offering
information," the Denver Post reported.
Now,
eight months later, Rudesheim, who has presided over
Samarra ever since, insisted the townspeople were still
with him. "What we hear is that the people of Samarra
are fed up [with the guerrillas]," he told reporters.
SFTT.org, a military website quoted in
www.warincontext.org and tomdispatch.com, featured a
message from an anonymous US "combat leader" who claims
to have been in the Samarra ambush. He complained that
Rudesheim "is not trained in counter-Insurgency, and my
soldiers are taking the heat".
"We drive around
in convoys, blast the hell out of the area, break down
doors and search buildings; but the guerillas continue
to attacks [sic] us. It does not take a [General] George
Patton to see we are using the wrong tactics against
these people."
(Inter Press Service)
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