Home > Attack on base near Samarra illustrates rebels’ organization
Attack on base near Samarra illustrates rebels’ organization
by Open-Publishing - Wednesday 14 July 2004By Damien McElroy
SAMARRA, Iraq - The attack was as brazen as it was meticulously planned. Under the gaze of a former Iraqi general wearing a Saddam Hussein-era olive-green uniform, a disciplined force of former soldiers unleashed a 90-minute mortar barrage on a U.S. base on the edge of Samarra.
The onslaught, witnessed on Thursday by the Sunday Telegraph, claimed the lives of five American troops and six Iraqis in the most daring raid yet by Saddam loyalists in the shrine city 60 miles north of Baghdad.
For almost two weeks, Samarra - like Fallujah to the west of the capital - has been an outlaw town and a no-go area for the American-led multinational force.
On Thursday, the insurgents - Sunni loyalists thrown out of power along with Saddam - demonstrated a new capability to kill Americans in a sophisticated military operation rather than a hit-and-run ambush.
The synchronized attack began when a car bomb devastated the headquarters of the local Iraqi National Guard. In the chaotic aftermath, several guards rushed to the still-intact locker room, throwing off their uniforms in the hope that they could flee without being noticed.
A five-minute drive away, the former general was overseeing the next phase of the operation as his men set up mortar positions at a crossroad in the al-Sina’ai district.
A two-way radio in the general’s hand crackled with reports from rooftop positions overlooking the town. Precisely at midday, he barked a one-word order: "Start."
With a sharp crack and rush of air, the barrage of mortars arced toward an American army base on the outskirts of the city.
Professional soldiers who knew how to gauge and range an artillery piece were in charge, an alarming development for the Americans, who have endured mainly ill-directed artillery attacks during the year-old uprising.
The attackers were not talkative, but did not appear suspicious of outside scrutiny.
"Welcome," said the general, who declined to give his name. "I will not say anything, but watch the Iraqi army in action."
A spokesman for the U.S. 1st Infantry Division, Maj. Neal O’Brien, later said five soldiers and two Iraqi National Guardsmen had been killed in the onslaught.
Thirty-eight mortars struck in four bombardments before U.S. forces quelled the attack in midafternoon using fighter jets and Apache helicopters armed with Hellfire missiles. Missiles were fired at the rooftop positions of the lookouts and at commanders directing the assault.
In the most spectacular strike, they demolished the third and fourth floors of the Al Medhi hotel. As eight helicopters landed to evacuate the American troops from bunkers in the camp, the first looters started to spill onto the site, only to be driven back by machine-gun fire.
Within an hour, the city had been sealed off, and American tanks and armored vehicles moved into its center, which also boasts one of the Shi’ite sect’s holiest shrines. It was the U.S. Army’s first deployment inside Samarra in more than 10 days. In that time, the resistance, dressed in the uniforms of Saddam’s state, had gained control of the streets.
Shortly before the morning’s car bomb, the Sunday Telegraph met seven former soldiers led by a man wearing captain’s epaulets manning a checkpoint at the edge of the city center.
He said the U.S.-trained Iraqi National Guard was afraid to puncture his cordon: "The National Guard are traitors, they work with the Americans but are afraid to come in here. We control Samarra now."
He boasted that they had begun to drive out the city’s Kurdish population, which he denounced as a pro-American fifth column.