The mystery of why BUSH LIES ABOUT EVERYTHING.....
US Under Pressure to Back Claims Over Iraq Firefight
By Phil Reeves
The Independent UK
Thursday 04 December 2003
Pressure is mounting on the United States military to support its claim to have killed 54 Iraqi
guerrillas in the biggest battle since George Bush declared an end to major combat seven months ago.
Scepticism about the US's version of the death toll has been expressed within upper echelons of the
occupation authorities. A US combat leader who was involved in the battle has also denounced the
military's account of the battle.
The controversy began on Sunday last week when Iraqi guerrillas attacked two US military convoys
escorting new Iraqi currency to banks in Samarra, a Sunni town which is a hotbed of anti-US
sentiment.
The US military said later on the same day that it had killed 46 attackers in a battle between
insurgents and American soldiers. The army later amended the number of dead upwards to 54. It said
its evidence came from US soldiers and commanders involved in the clashes.
Iraqi hospital officials and police say the death toll was far lower - eight with some 55 injured. Iraqi
residents have given conflicting and inconsistent accounts of the battle including an erroneous claim
that a mosque was hit by an American missile.
The US military believes the bodies of the 54 dead were swiftly collected and buried. But is
questionable whether the guerrillas' families or surviving combatants would have risked recovering
known members of the resistance in a town which is under constant US surveillance; the Americans
have a base in Samarra.
The question is whether the US and the occupation authorities have misled the media.
The credibility of the US military was dented in April after it supplied inaccurate information about the
killing of 14 Iraqis in Fallujah by the 82nd Airborne Division, when its soldiers opened fire on
demonstrators . In the aftermath of the killings US Central Command said that it was unable to say
whether any Iraqis had been killed. However, in Samarra the US army says its soldiers performed fixed
procedures for counting those killed and wounded.
These include a battle damage assessment - in which reports are made by US soldiers as the
fighting occurs and immediately afterwards - and an after-action report in which soldiers go through
what happened in greater detail.
Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said: "We have no reason to believe that those were inaccurate
figures. We stand by those numbers, they were provided by soldiers that were involved in the
engagement and we see no reason to suggest those numbers are incorrect."
Go to Original
US Forces Accused of 'Massacre' in Disputed Iraq Battle
By Peter Spiegel and Nicolas Pelham
The Financial Times
Wednesday 03 December 2003
The US army came under renewed pressure on Wednesday over its conduct in a battle at the
weekend in the central Iraqi town of Samarra, as Iran's senior religious leader accused the American
forces of "a savage massacre" in which 54 locals were reportedly killed.
The battle, in which US forces attempting to deliver new Iraqi currency to two Samarran banks were
ambushed by a small force of insurgents - said by US officials to have been dressed as fighters from
Saddam Hussein's fedayeen militia - has led to wildly differing accounts from American military officials
and local witnesses.
Hospital officials in Samarra said only eight people were killed, all of them civilians, including one
Iranian pilgrim. Samarra is the burial place of two of Shia Islam's most revered imams.
Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for coalition forces in Iraq, said he had
spoken about the incident on Wednesday to the commander of the division responsible for security in
central Iraq, Major General Ray Odierno, but that no investigation had been sought. "He, at this point,
believes he has been given the full truth but wants to close out any questions out there," Brig Gen
Kimmitt said.
Saadun Isawi, a police official at Samarra hospital, said the facility had received 54 wounded and that
the dead included a 73-year-old Iranian pilgrim to the Imam Hadi shrine, a 10-year-old boy and a female
employee at Samarra pharmaceutical plant.
Asked about the discrepancy in the numbers of dead, Brig Gen Kimmitt, who said the figure of 54
killed had been arrived at after debriefing troops involved in the action, added: "I can't imagine why the
enemy would want to bring a dead body to a hospital."
US officials were at pains to point out that any Iraqi deaths came only after American troops had been
ambushed and that the incident had not been instigated as part of the coalition's recently stepped-up
offensive operations. They also said conflicting accounts often existed of firefights but that the first
rendition from US soldiers engaged in an attack was usually borne out in final reporting. "I trust the
reports of my soldiers," said Brig Gen Kimmitt. "The people that attacked those trucks were attacking
not only coalition soldiers but were attacking Iraqis trying to provide money for a restored, restabilised,
rebuilt Iraq."
According to the official Iranian news agency, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, said
"the brutal and arrogant occupiers" had "desecrated" a holy Islamic site. Both the outer perimeter walls
of the al-Hadi shrine complex, and the mirrors of the shrine itself were scarred by bullets but it was not
clear who had fired them. Locals claimed US soldiers had fired indiscriminately at attackers and
civilians alike; an American military official acknowledged that munitions used in the engagement could
easily have passed through walls behind combatants.
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