TIME: Appointment in
Samarra
Monday, October 11, 2004
The U.S. has a lot of work to do if it's going to
take back Iraqi cities held by insurgents. The job
began last week, as 3,000 U.S. and 2,000 Iraqi troops
stormed Samarra. In September talks with tribal
groups there helped the U.S. begin to seat a city
council. But the accord broke down, and the city
slipped into rebel control. Baghdad bureau chief
Michael Ware reports from Samarra, which is a tune-up
battle for tougher strongholds like Fallujah.
By MICHAEL WARE
There were a lot of nasty places to be in Samarra
last week after U.S. and Iraqi forces began their
assault early Friday morning, but one of the nastiest
was with the platoon led by Lieutenant Ryan Purdy.
Sweating it out in streets full of smoke and the odor
of cordite, Purdy and his troops found cover in
firing positions littered with flesh from insurgents
blown apart by U.S. cannon fire from an armored
vehicle. Pinned down by snipers, the men were trapped
alongside the corpses, battling a stench that grew
stronger as the morning wore on and the temperature
climbed. When at last the platoon could move, it
could do so only under the cover of chattering guns
and multicolored smoke grenades. By then, the rebels
that the platoon was fighting had simply melted away.
"This enemy wants to erode our forces while
preserving his own," a frustrated Purdy said.
If that is the rebels' goal, they will have to work
hard to achieve it. The Samarra offensive played by
the slippery rules of guerrilla warfare that U.S.
troops have come to master more and more. The bulk of
what intelligence suggests are 200 to 500 rebels is
thought to be made up of local Baathists and former
military officers fighting for a return of a
Sunni-dominated government or national liberation.
The rest are foreign jihadis and hard-core Iraqi
Islamists heeding the call of terrorist leaders like
Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi. For weeks, the al-Zarqawi
fighters had made their presence in the city known.
Only two days before the attack, there were reports
of armed men roaming the city under the group's
telltale black-and-yellow banners, stopping traffic
and seizing music cassettes, which they consider
un-Islamic, and replacing them with religious tapes.
In the first hours of Operation Baton Rouge, as the
assault on Samarra was code named, the insurgents
would not even have known about the thousands of
troops, heavy armor and attack helicopters massing
against them. Any column entering the city could
easily have been taken for just another patrol or
sweep. But as early as Monday, a brigade-size
contingent was quietly forming around the city.
Handling the heaviest fighting would be the soldiers
of the battle-hardened 1st Battalion of the 14th
Infantry Regiment. Stationed in Kirkuk to the north,
the 1/14 battalion knows something about the feints
and vanishing acts of the insurgents, having faced
them in Najaf, Tall 'Afar and elsewhere. The 1/14
would follow the 1st Battalion of the 26th Infantry
Regiment, which would hit Samarra first, crossing a
long bridge leading into the city to secure a staging
area for the troops that would pour in afterward.
Just past midnight on Friday morning, the 1/26 moved.
The 1/14, not far behind, heard the firing.
"I'm nervous," confided one member of the 1/14, a
19-year-old infantryman with a wife and baby at home.
"They say these guys will stand and fight." The squad
commander did what he could to keep the anxious men
focused on the job. "Let's make this the worst
morning of their lives," he challenged.
It may have been--but for both sides. The scene in
Samarra was similar to those anywhere in Iraq in
which soldiers have had to shoot into cities. In one
intersection, the body of a rebel lay in pieces, torn
apart by 25-mm cannon fire, while a mother hurried by
holding her toddler by the hand. The child stared at
the remains. At one point, a group of Purdy's men
tumbled into an Iraqi house seeking safety and found
themselves facing a woman with her arms around five
children. Figuring that the soldiers would not harm
her family, she offered the Americans water.
Elsewhere, heads kept popping out from front gates as
quizzical residents--perhaps numbed after so many
months of conflict--looked out at the commotion. "Get
inside! Get inside!," soldiers screamed desperately.
Children endlessly scampered across streets, forcing
the troops to shoot above their heads. One old man
carrying a mop sauntered between the lines. "These
people are crazy," said a sergeant.
But the messy warfare produced quick results, or at
least it appeared to. More than 100 rebels were said
to have been killed, and the city, for the most part,
was quickly brought back under military control--with
the Iraqi troops taking special care to seize
Samarra's Golden mosque, denying the rebels the kind
of rallying point they had had when they hunkered
down in the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf. Although
fighting continued throughout the afternoon and
sporadically into Friday night, the enemy simply
seemed to evaporate afterward. "By about [2:00 p.m.]
they realized what they were up against and
withdrew," says Captain Jim Pangelinan, who led his
Alpha Company of the 1/14 into the western edge of
the city. Withdrawing, however, can be the most
confounding thing the insurgents do.
Al-Zarqawi's fighters think nothing of the martyrdom
that comes from dying in battle, and if they simply
vanished this time, U.S. forces will surely see them
again. "Our worst-case scenario is where we have an
enemy who is not coming out to fight," says
Pangelinan.
Many of the rebels are probably still lurking in the
city, hoping to blend back in or waiting for their
chance to flee. It is now up to Iraqi forces to sniff
them out. Some insurgents may have already been
nabbed making their getaway--like six men who were
captured in a boat crossing a river on Saturday--but
it's hard to tell because once they put down their
weapons, they could just as easily be seen as
civilians. When a platoon was ambushed on a
residential street late on Friday--triggering a
blazing exchange between two U.S. units--four unarmed
men emerged an hour later claiming they had merely
been out shopping. "I say we just kill 'em anyway," a
rifleman who had been part of the friendly-fire
incident darkly joked.
In a measure of the looking-glass standards that have
come to be applied in this increasingly makeshift
war, Iraqi Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib told a
press conference on Saturday that the battle for
Samarra had been a "very clean" operation. That may
be, but if so, American planners won't want to see
messy.