Iraqi Soldiers Say It Was Fight or Die
By DEXTER FILKINS
DIWANIYA, Iraq, March 26 — The aftermath of the firefight was a tableau of twisted Iraqi bodies, tins of unopened food and the dirty mattresses where they had spent their final hours.
But the Iraqi private with a bullet wound in the back of his head suggested something unusually grim. Up and down the 200-mile stretch of desert where the American and British forces have advanced, one Iraqi prisoner after another has told captors a similar tale: that many Iraqi soldiers were fighting at gunpoint, threatened with death by tough loyalists of President Saddam Hussein.
Here, according to American doctors and Iraqi prisoners, appeared to be one confirmation. The wounded Iraqi, whose life was ebbing away outside an American field hospital, had been shot during the firefight Tuesday night with American troops. It was a small-caliber bullet, most likely from a pistol, fired at close range. Iraqi prisoners taken after the battle said their officers had been firing at them, pushing them into battle.
"The officers threatened to shoot us unless we fought," said a wounded Iraqi from his bed in the American field hospital here. "They took out their guns and pointed them and told us to fight."
As the American medics patched up the wounds of three other Iraqi soldiers, they said there was little they could do for the one who had been shot in the head. Much of his skull had come apart, and the medics labeled him "expectant," which meant he was expected to die. They gave him morphine, wrapped him in a green blanket and put him on a stretcher outside their tent.
"We think he was shot by his own," Dr. Wade Wilde, a Marine surgeon, said. "If he had been hit by an M-16, it would have taken his whole head off. It seems like it was an Iraqi gun." As Dr. Wilde spoke, his eyes drifted to the Iraqi soldier, still clinging to life, on the stretcher. "We've tried to make him as comfortable as possible," he said, "and let the wound run its course."
It is wild here near the front of the American advance, 110 miles south of Baghdad. The ambushes are more frequent, the Iraqi soldiers more desperate, the Americans more jumpy. At night, the perimeter of the American camp echoes with the sound of mortar fire and the yips of wild dogs. "The closer we get to Baghdad, the crazier it gets," Sgt. Robert Gardner, a marine at a base here, said.
The American marines making their way up the Baghdad Highway through central Iraq came under attack at least three times in the past 24 hours. Two of the attacks, including those in which the Iraqi soldiers said they were shot by their own officers, followed a similar pattern.
The Iraqis waited for the tanks and other armored vehicles to pass, then opened fire, as if hoping to hurt the American force but unable to match its heavier weapons. Twice on Tuesday, the Americans came under fire that way.
The first attack came before dawn, when a convoy of marines came under fire from Iraqi irregulars. The details were sketchy, but American officers said they had taken several Iraqi militiamen prisoner, killed several of the Iraqis and lost none of their own. On the road north, the only sign of the encounter was a pool of blood on the side of the road.
Hours later, during a swirling sandstorm, the American convoy again came under attack. A force thought to number about 150 Iraqis was waiting in trenches about 100 yards off the highway. That fight proved more deadly: an American marine was killed and another was wounded, along with at least a dozen Iraqis killed.
Cpl. Chad Stroup was riding with a group of his comrades in a personnel carrier when he heard the banging of bullets on the vehicle's armored shell. His driver, seeking to avoid the fire, swerved and flipped the carrier into an Iraqi trench. Corporal Stroup and the others piled out the vehicle and ran for cover, somehow avoiding the Iraqi soldiers thought to be in the trench. The fight, he said, ended abruptly with American artillery fire. "There were two loud explosions, then it went quiet," he said.
The scene after Tuesday night's battle suggested an Iraqi force that was not as spirited as some of those that American troops have encountered recently in Nasiriya and Najaf.
Scattered through the Iraqi trenches was an arsenal hardly up to the task of slowing the American advance: a few hand grenades, some rocket launchers, three dozen magazines for Kalashnikov rifles. A pair of filthy mattresses and moldy blankets were thrown together in a pile. A dozen corpses lay splayed about in the ditch. Perhaps the only ominous articles were Iraqi gas masks strewn about the trench line.
On the roadside, the Iraqi prisoners huddled together. Only a few had uniforms; most wore tattered clothing and battered shoes. They did not seem like men who lusted for battle. American marines guarding the prisoners said they had complained that their own officers had shot at them during the battle. "I have four children at home, and they threatened to hurt them if I did not fight," another one of the wounded Iraqis said. "I had no choice."
Perhaps because of those accusations, the Americans had taken the group's leader, an Iraqi brigadier general, and sat him on the ground away from the others.
By midafternoon, the marines were embroiled in yet another fight. This one was just three miles away, close enough for Iraqi mortar shells to fall near the American camp. A Marine battalion of about 600 men was dispatched to confront the Iraqis, and by nightfall the sound of artillery rumbled through the area.
By nightfall, the marines, so often a picture of tireless and cocksure youth, were on edge. Around 8 p.m., a sentry guarding the base opened fire, and soon he was joined by a volley of rockets and machine-gun fire from a number of his comrades. Afterward, the area went still. Yet with so little light and so little certain, no one seemed to know whether the young soldiers had been firing at Iraqi intruders or the wild dogs yipping outside the camp.
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