U.S.
attack threatens to create
thousands of new Iraqi enemies
By Tom Lasseter
and Drew Brown
Knight Ridder Newspapers
15 June, 2003
RAWAH, Iraq - Hassan Ibrahim
walked the narrow space between the fresh graves and shook his head.
There were 78, some of them packed with more than one body, with rocks
as markers. The air stank of death. The names of the dead were written
on paper and folded into soda bottles stuck in the ground.
"This town was safe
before the Americans come here and made a lot of blood," said Ibrahim.
"Is this the democracy they were talking about?"
The graves were all that
remained after U.S. forces struck a suspected terrorist training camp
five and a half miles from town Thursday, raking the earth with missiles
and machine-gun fire.
Although the attack was a
military success, it threatens to create thousands of new enemies in
this small farming city on the banks of the Euphrates River. In a place
where everyone knows each other and the streets are quiet after dark,
the number of corpses and the havoc of battle could have unintended
consequences.
"If I get a chance,
I would shoot an American, because they are now my enemies," said
Marwan Alrawi, a member of a family that owns farmland throughout the
area. "Before this, 1 of 10,000 Rawah citizens would fight the
Americans. Now, more than half would."
The backlash highlights the
increasingly difficult task of crushing Baath Party loyalists and what
U.S. officials say are a growing number of foreign fighters while also
winning the hearts and minds of ordinary Iraqis.
The raid was part of some
of the heaviest fighting in Iraq since President Bush declared the war
over on May 1. Most of it has taken place in the "Triangle,"
an area that extends from Baghdad, Iraq, in the east to Tikrit, Iraq,
in the north, and then west almost to Syria. The area, made up predominately
of conservative Sunni Muslims, has been a recent flashpoint of attacks
on American troops.
Attacks continued early Friday
when a group of Iraqi gunmen ambushed a column of tanks from the Army's
4th Infantry Division with rocket-propelled grenades near Balad, Iraq,
about 50 miles north of Baghdad. U.S. tanks, armored personnel carriers
and attack helicopters returned fire, killing 27 attackers, spokesmen
at the U.S. Central Command said.
Central Command officials
said the U.S. military offensives in recent days are part of "a
continued effort to eradicate Baath party loyalists, paramilitary groups
and other subversive elements."
Speaking to Pentagon reporters
in a teleconference on Friday, Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, the top allied
commander in Iraq, declined to say much about the Rawah raid. He did
not say who the suspected terrorists were.
"I will simply tell
you that it was a camp area that was confirmed with bad guys and specifically
who the bad guys are will be determined as we exploit the site,"
he said.
While many in Rawah, about
four hours west of Baghdad, said the people killed were fighters from
Syria and Iraq, the death toll outraged them.
Villagers said nearly 80
fighters were killed in the raid. Maj. Brad Lowell, a spokesman for
the U.S. Central Command, said the number of casualties couldn't be
confirmed.
"The command has always
stayed away from specific body counts," Lowell said. "The
bottom line is if we're in that area and we've put this type of combat
power there, then it's obvious there's some significant concentration
of enemy there."
A Pentagon official said
information remains sketchy about the nationalities of those killed
in the raid. "Some Syrians were among them," said the official,
who spoke on condition of anonymity. "But there were other nationalities
as well."
Saleh said rumors in the
small, close-knit community say that the men at the desert camp were
training to be fighters of some sort. They met small groups of the men
when they came to market for food.
"They were from Syria,
Jordan, and one was even from France," said Mohammad Mohammad,
a man sitting next to Saleh. "Of course they were going to kill
the Americans, everyone hates the Americans."
In Rawah yesterday, the only
smiles were on the faces of people who showed a visitor the wreckage
of a U.S. Army Apache helicopter, apparently one from the 101st Airborne
Division that the military announced was shot down Thursday by "irregular
forces." The two U.S. crewmen were not hurt in the crash, and were
rescued.
Scraps of the helicopter
were jumbled in a dirt pile pushed by American bulldozers that left
town on Army trucks.
The same bulldozers, residents
said, pushed dirt and rocks over the bodies of five men near the helicopter
crash site. There were tracks leading to the location they named, and
pieces of clothing and the smell of dead bodies in and around the recently
moved rocks.
The men buried by the bulldozers
had been in a truck that sat nearby, burned-out and full of holes. It
was the men in the truck who shot down the helicopter with a rocket-propelled
grenade, said Mahdi Saleh, a local electrician who, awakened by the
firefight, drove out to a hilltop that looked toward the action.
From a purely military standpoint,
the operation was an unqualified success. McKiernan indicated that his
troops had the element of surprise. American jets bombed the camp before
special operations forces and troops from the 101st Airborne went in,
according to Pentagon officials.
"We struck it very lethally,
and we're exploiting whatever intelligence value we can get from that
site for future operations," McKiernan said.
The camp that was hit in
Rawah sat on a small strip of land between a row of reeds in a creek
bed and a cliff in the middle of the desert, reachable only by following
the small piles of rocks left by locals as sign posts.
In what remained of it, there
was a man's thumb sitting on the ground beside a charred straw mat.
Several yards away, there was an arm, cut off slightly above the elbow,
lying not far from the charred remains of a Koran. At least six broken
pieces of wooden boards marked graves for body parts that did not make
it to the graveyard.
Locals said that after the
fighting was done, they followed the smell of smoke, and their memory
of where the bright flashes had been, and loaded dozens of charred bodies
- "they were like burned meat," one man said - into the backs
of pickup trucks.
In the back of one of the
trucks were Adidas and Nike running shoes.
Among the items at the camp
were empty boxes that once held Soviet AK-47 rifle ammunition and rocket-propelled
grenades. There were mounds of spent bullets, as well as backpacks,
the same ones used by the Iraqi military, with tube-shaped pockets used
to carry RPG rounds.
A few people maintained that
the men at the camp were either Iraqis who meant only to protect the
townspeople from looters, or men who were using the hillside as a rock
quarry.
"The Americans are worse
than Saddam: He killed with a gun, the Americans kill with a bomb,"
said Ahmed Alsalam, a local farmer. "They have made their own mass
grave here."
(Lasseter reported from Rawah.
Brown reported from Washington. Dana Hull contributed to this report
from Baghdad.)