WP p. 1: Battle Reveals New Iraqi Tactics (Samarra report)

This is an account of the battle, in which one soldier says, "Everybody saw a different picture." There's reporting both from our military, and the Iraqi locals in the article subtitled, "Troops Startled by Fighters' Coordination and Resolve":


A day later, questions persisted over essential facts of the fighting (in Samarra), which ebbed and flowed through much of Sunday and ended with a devastating defeat of the Iraqi guerrillas who had massed against the overwhelming power of U.S. forces. The U.S. military said Monday that as many as 54 fighters were killed. No American soldiers died. The city's hospital reported only eight dead, all of them civilians, although officials there acknowledged that the bodies of fighters might not have been brought there.

To many involved -- both Iraqis and U.S. soldiers -- the confrontation stood out as an exceptionally fierce battle after months of hit-and-run attacks. Witnesses described dozens of guerrillas in checkered head scarves brazenly roaming the streets in the heat of battle, U.S. soldiers firing randomly in crowded neighborhoods and civilian bystanders taking up arms against U.S. forces once the fight got underway.

For the military, the fight revealed a startling new reality about the fighters themselves -- unprecedented coordination and tactics and numbers yet unseen. Hollis says he saw a determination he did not expect from guerrillas best known for hitting, then running.

"I'm telling you these guys taking some of the shots knew they were going to die," said Hollis, a 17-year veteran and native of Pensacola, Fla. "But they still, under that fire, squeezed the trigger, even though they knew that was the last thing they were going to do. They were standing the ground and fighting, and our guys were standing the ground and fighting."

"Both sides are sending a message," he added.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26784-2003Dec1.html

Soon we will learn that there were no Fedayeen fighters, just civilians, no barricades just a bunch of small shops along the road.

Since they were escorting some armoured vehicles full of cash, I bet some of that cash disappeared in the heat of shooting and fighting. Which later be claimed as insurgent attack on Iraqi cash carrying convoy.

The only way to know the truth is to be a witness of that event.

This reminds me of Vietnam. With overwhelming fire power, the military defeats those who attack them and at the same time solidify the resistance. This is not going well.

A Combat Leader Gives The Inside Skinny Of The Biggest Battle Since The War Ended

http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=Special%20Reports%20Hack.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=92&rnd=16.346899020788562

Don't know how reliable this source is!

<http://www.sftt.org/>

when I posted it in another thread. Seems the insurgents have once again responded to the commanders yapping in the media. Remember when they were claiming the insurgents were attacking civilians in an attempt to get them worked up against the coalition? The insurgents changed their tactics to goad the coalition troops into firing on the civilians themselves. Much more powerful this way.
So sad, we must get our troops out of there, get NATO and UN involved.

This is what we did in Vietnam. "Kill em all and let God sort em out."

Former Secretary Schlesinger was on Cspan in early september on a European relations seminar and took the opportunity to lecture everyone (including the journalists on the panel) on how we won the war in Vietnam but had to pull out because of a defeatist press. This is from the same vein. "The viet cong were desively and irrevocably defeated"