The plan seemed straightforward. The marines would speed unhindered over
the 130 miles of desert up from the Kuwaiti border and approach Nasiriya
from the southeast to secure a bridge over the Euphrates. They would then
drive north through the outskirts of Nasiriya to a second bridge, over
the Inahr al-Furbati canal. Finally, they would turn west and secure the
third bridge, also over the canal. The marines would not enter the city
proper, let alone attempt to take it.

Amid the wreckage I counted 12 dead civilians, lying in the road or in
nearby ditches. All had been trying to leave this southern town
overnight, probably for fear of being killed by US helicopter attacks and
heavy artillery.

Their mistake had been to flee over a bridge that is crucial to the
coalition's supply lines and to run into a group of shell-shocked young
American marines with orders to shoot anything that moved.

One man's body was still in flames. It gave out a hissing sound. Tucked
away in his breast pocket, thick wads of banknotes were turning to ashes.
His savings, perhaps.

Down the road, a little girl, no older than five and dressed in a pretty
orange and gold dress, lay dead in a ditch next to the body of a man who
may have been her father. Half his head was missing.

Nearby, in a battered old Volga, peppered with ammunition holes, an Iraqi
woman - perhaps the girl's mother - was dead, slumped in the back seat. A
US Abrams tank nicknamed Ghetto Fabulous drove past the bodies.

.......

Only a few days earlier these had still been the bright-eyed small-town
boys with whom I crossed the border at the start of the operation. They
had rolled towards Nasiriya, a strategic city beside the Euphrates, on a
mission to secure a safe supply route for troops on the way to Baghdad.

They had expected a welcome, or at least a swift surrender. Instead they
had found themselves lured into a bloody battle, culminating in the worst
coalition losses of the war - 16 dead, 12 wounded and two missing marines
as well as five dead and 12 missing servicemen from an army convoy - and
the humiliation of having prisoners paraded on Iraqi television.