Iraqis Deny US Accounts of Fierce Fight with ’Guerrillas’

by Phil Reeves in Samara

http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=469253&host=3&dir=75

To Ali Abdullah Amin, the accusations and denials that were yesterday
flying about the latest battle between the occupiers and occupied of
Iraq - the fiercest engagement, some say, since the early days of the
US-led invasion - were irrelevant.

He was not interested in whether the American military was telling the
truth when it said that its troops had killed 54 "attackers" -
shorthand for Iraqi guerrillas who carried out a double ambush against
a US convoy in the Sunni town of Samarra on Sunday which turned into a
running fire fight.

Nor was he wondering about the denials made by Iraqi hospital
officials and policemen, in the face of what the Americans have
presented as a crushing defeat for the pro-Saddamists, Ba’athists, ex-
soldiers and other fighters who are violently opposing their presence.

Iraqi officials say only eight people died, including a 71-year-old
Iranian pilgrim called Fathollah Hejazi, whose charred passport they
were showing to all-comers. The old man had, it seems, come to visit
the ancient gold-domed Shi’ite mosque in this once-peaceful town on
the banks of the Tigris.

Ali Abdullah Amin was interested in none of these things. What he
cared about, as he lay beneath a grubby yellow blanket in his hospital
bed, was the pain in his bandaged legs, both of which were seeping
blood from bullet wounds, and the hole in the left side of his
stomach. "My legs hurt, my legs hurt," the little boy moaned, as he
cried in the arms of his 22-year-old cousin, Jamal Karim.

He may also have been wondering about the whereabouts of his father,
Abdullah Amin al-Kurdi. Father and son were shot outside a small
nearby mosque, a spot now marked by a large congealed pool of blood.
Father didn’t make it.

Iraqi witnesses were unanimous that Americans were to blame, pointing
to a hole in a nearby cemetery wall which looked like the work of a
shell fired from an Abrams tank. The US military stuck by its story of
the battle, and by its estimation of the Iraqi death toll. Fifty-four
Iraqis died, it said, all combatants. Major Gordon Tate, a spokesman
at the headquarters of the 4th Infantry Division in Tikrit, insisted
the US military was "confident" about its assessment of the "battle
damage".

"Soldiers and commanders on the site counted," he told The
Independent. "Every commander on the site is responsible for doing
battle damage assessment. Part of that includes counting the dead and
wounded on both sides."

Ali and his father appear to have slipped through the net. Even though
the boy’s hospital bed is only 10 minutes away from the US Army’s base
in Samarra, and although he was easily found by journalists, he does
not appear to be part of the "battle damage assessment". Asked about
wounded Iraqi civilians, Major Tate said he had no information on the
subject.

As occupiers of Iraq, the US is responsible under international law
for the safety of the civilians living under its rule. The senior US
military commander, Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, said this
weekend that his troops conduct follow-up visits to places where they
have been involved in fighting. But Ali’s cousin, Jamal Karim,
speaking yesterday afternoon, said no US official had been to see him
or the injured boy.

Nor, said Samarra’s hospital information officer, Sa’id Hassan Ali al-
Janabi, had any "coalition" officials come to see any of the others
wounded on Sunday. Had they done so, they could have seen his list of
the injured - 55 names, including five women. These were, he insisted,
all civilians, some with light injuries but a few with wounds so
critical that they had been moved to hospitals in Baghdad or Tikrit.

Had the same officials visited Samarra’s streets they could also have
heard many accounts of the battle that differed greatly from their
own.

The US military says the ambushes began at 1.30pm when the 1st
Battalion of the 66th Armored Regiment, accompanied by US military
police, came under attack from Iraqis on the east and west sides of
Samarra. The guerrillas fired mortars, improvised explosives, rocket-
propelled grenades and Kalashnikovs. The Americans replied by firing
the 120mm cannon on their Abrams tanks, the smaller 25mm automatic
cannon on their Bradley fighting vehicles, and an assortment of small
arms, mainly M-16 rifles and 9mm pistols.

The US military blamed members of Saddam Hussein’s fedayeen
paramilitary force. This appears to be based in part on the clothing
of the dead, although it sounded like the apparel of many young Arabs.

Iraqis in Samarra told a different story. Some of their accounts were
easily disprovable but there was consensus that the American troops
fired randomly at times, and that there were no uniformed Iraqi
fighters in their midst. Several detailed descriptions from Iraqis
confirmed that guerrillas were also firing on the Americans, and that
there were prolonged fire fights.

One businessman said that it was started when the Iraqis ambushed the
Americans on the edge of town. Another, Mothana Mohammed Badie, a 32-
year-old shopkeeper - said fighting erupted when US forces arrived to
deliver some new Iraqi dinars to a local bank, a view which coincides
with the American version.

He said he was in the area, but ran home to his wife and children only
to have his house shot up by a volley of .50 bullets from a passing
Abrams tank. Shortly afterwards he was joined by his father, Dr
Mohammed Badie, the vice-president of Tikrit University.

Dr Badie called the fedayeen "terrorists". But, as he stood in his
partially wrecked bullet-pocked front room, he appeared close to
despair.

"All the people here are fed up and angry," he said. They want the
Americans out of town ... They [the Americans] have to respect our
feelings and traditions and customs, but we see the opposite. There is
something here that is hidden from the American public. They call it
’Tha’ar’ - revenge. That means that if anyone kills your friend, or
your brother, you have to avenge it by killing an American soldier."

This is, in the clichés of journalism, called the cycle of violence.
And the wheel is rotating with ever-increasing speed.