The Times, The absence of dead Iraqi fighters after US troops reported killing at least 54 guerillas in a fierce battle in the town of Samarra raised serious questions about the military claims yesterday. Only eight bodies, mostly civilians including women and children, were in the morgue.
US spokesmen said up to 80 guerillas ambushed two military convoys delivering new Iraqi currency to banks in the town, a centre of resistance to the occupying forces located about 100km north of Baghdad.
The fighters were said to have emerged from rooftops, behind walls and from speeding cars to fire on the US troops. Soldiers who fought off the attack said it had been “touch and go”.
It was the kind of fighting the Americans feared when they entered Baghdad in April — an urban battle in which their military superiority would be nullified by close-quarters resistance. One sergeant said the guerillas were “so close” he was shooting at them with a pump-action shotgun.
But Iraqi residents said the US forces poured fire into houses, mosques and even a kindergarten, prompting local people to reach for their guns and join the street battle.
The imam of a mosque hit by a mortar called on all Muslims to join a jihad against the occupiers, while some of those injured in the strikes said the US forces had triggering a holy war.
Colonel Frederick Rudesheim, of the US Fourth Infantry Division, which controls the region, said his death toll of guerillas came from debriefing his men, who had faced carefully co-ordinated ambushes. He attributed the discrepancy in numbers to the guerillas trying to conceal their dead and wounded.
“It was a concerted effort by the enemy to deal a significant blow to coalition forces,” said Colonel Rudesheim, presenting soldiers who fought in the battle at a base outside Samarra, where several Iraqi prisoners stood bound and with bags over their heads near long columns of tanks.
One of the commanders on the ground, Captain Andy Deponai, reported that his men had been under constant fire for 45 minutes and said his tank had been hit by a rocket-propelled grenade.
However, the Americans suffered no losses. They said the guerillas had noted the routes taken by the convoys delivering the new money at the end of each month and had prepared ambush sites and roadside explosives along the way.
The guerillas redeployed in civilian cars to harry the US vehicles as they blasted their way out, US officers said.
The US forces included 93 soldiers with eight tanks, four Bradley fighting vehicles and six armoured Humvees.
Among the soldiers were two squads of military police and four squads of infantry.
Colonel Rudesheim said the money had already been delivered when the attacks started. A member of the US-backed Iraqi Civil Defence Corps, a paramilitary force designed to crack down on lawlessness in Iraq, said the attack was a disaster.
He said it was planned by former regime loyalists to cause a bloodbath in the town of 180,000 people, and suggested the aim of the attack might have been to steal the cash to bankroll the guerillas.
US officers said the attackers were dressed in uniforms worn by Saddam Hussein's Fedayeen militia, but this was dismissed by an Iraqi policeman. “Everyone wearing a kafiyeh (an Arab headdress) was a Fedayeen to the Americans,” he said.
