[Marinir] [time.com] Appointment in Samarra

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http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101041011-709017,00.html

W O R L D
Appointment in Samarra
An eyewitness account of the vicious battle to retake the Iraqi city
By MICHAEL WARE
MAX BECHERER / POLARIS FOR TIME
STORMING INTO SAMARRA:
U.S. soldiers on a mission to retake the city from insurgents walk through
streets littered with bodies

Sunday, Oct. 03, 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.
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.

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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.

>From the Oct. 11, 2004 issue of TIME magazine
Page 1 of 2   1 | 2   Next > >


 W O R L D
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.

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