Iraqis
Say Lynch Raid Faced No Resistance
By Keith
B. Richburg
Washington Post
Foreign Service
15 April , 2003
NASIRIYAH, Iraq,
April 14 -- Accounts of the U.S. military's dramatic rescue of Pfc.
Jessica Lynch from Saddam Hospital here two weeks ago read like the
stuff of a Hollywood script. For Iraqi doctors working in the hospital
that night, it was exactly that -- Hollywood dazzle, with little need
for real action.
"They made
a big show," said Haitham Gizzy, a physician at the public hospital
here who treated Lynch for her injuries. "It was just a drama,"
he said. "A big, dramatic show."
Gizzy and other
doctors said no Iraqi soldiers or militiamen were at the hospital that
night, April 1, when the U.S. Special Operations forces came in helicopters
to carry out the midnight rescue. Most of the Saddam's Fedayeen fighters,
and the entire Baath Party leadership, including the governor of the
province, had come to the hospital earlier in the day, changed into
civilian clothes and fled, the doctors said.
"They brought
their civilian wear with them," said Mokhdad Abd Hassan, who was
on duty that day and evening. He pointed to green army uniforms still
piled on the lawn. "You can see their military suits," he
said. "They all ran away, the same day."
"It was
all the leadership," Gizzy said. "Even the governor and the
director general of the Baath Party. . . . They left walking, barefoot,
in civilian wear."
The disappearance
of the Iraqi forces from Nasiriyah -- a crossroads town 200 miles south
of Baghdad that was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting and heaviest
U.S. casualties in the war -- in many ways mirrored the evaporation
of the militia and Baath Party fighters elsewhere in Iraq. From the
southern city of Basra, where British troops walked in almost unopposed
after a 21/2-week standoff, to the capital, Baghdad, where President
Saddam Hussein and his ruling circle vanished without a trace, Iraqi
resistance to the U.S.-led invasion appears to have followed a well-set
and planned pattern: Fight to a point, then disappear.
In Nasiriyah,
"it look like an organized manner" of retreat, Gizzy said.
The governor arrived in his dark four-wheel-drive Land Cruiser, which
he left parked in the hospital driveway as he escaped on foot.
The car remains
in the driveway , minus its four wheels that a religious group removed
to prevent a rival political faction from stealing it. The fleeing Iraqi
government hierarchy left behind seven other new and expensive cars,
but the doctors said they set fire to them to eliminate the temptation
for looters to scale the hospital walls.
U.S. troops
have been posted at the hospital to secure it against looters. But at
the time U.S. commandos came to rescue Lynch, Gizzy said, "there
were no soldiers at our hospital, just the medical staff. There were
just us doctors."
Lynch, 19, a
supply clerk with the Army's 507th Maintenance Company, was captured
March 23 when her unit made a wrong turn near Nasiriyah and was ambushed.
Initial accounts reported how she was shot and stabbed and continued
battling Iraqi fighters until she ran out of ammunition. But the doctors
here who treated her said she suffered fractures to her arms and lower
limbs and a "small skull wound," sustained when her vehicle
overturned.
Lynch's U.S.
doctors have said she suffered fractures in her upper right arm, upper
left leg, lower left leg and right ankle and foot. Her father, Greg
Lynch Sr., told reporters she had no penetration wounds.
"It was
a road traffic accident," Gizzy said. "There was not a drop
of blood. . . . There were no bullets or shrapnel or anything like that."
At the hospital, he said, "She was given special care, more than
the Iraqi patients."
The physician
said Lynch was first treated at an Iraqi military hospital before being
transferred to the Saddam public hospital. An intelligence agent was
posted in the hallway to guard the prisoner of war's first-floor hospital
room. An Iraqi man whose wife worked at the hospital noticed the guard,
discovered Lynch was the patient and alerted U.S. military personnel.
He was sent back to gather more information, and the rescue was carried
out April 1.
Hassan and other
doctors said they were on duty that evening, when "we heard a big
thumping nearby the hospital. And the sound of helicopters -- not just
one. Then someone from the hospital, a colleague, said soldiers were
entering the hospital from the back door."
"We agreed
to stay in one room, not to intervene," Hassan said. The soldiers
broke down several doors in the hospital before locating Lynch, and
then went to the back of the hospital to recover the remains of nine
U.S. soldiers buried in shallow graves. Eight of them, from Lynch's
unit, were killed in the same ambush.
"They took
Jessica and recovered the cadavers from behind the hospital," Hassan
said. He said he believed the U.S. troops were on the hospital grounds
for almost three hours.
The doctors
at Nasiriyah's public hospital said they welcomed the U.S. and British
invasion for having toppled Hussein's government. But that support is
tempered by the high number of civilian casualties in Nasiriyah. Many
of them, including women and children, remain in the crowded wards,
suffering from severed limbs and deep lacerations the doctors said were
caused by U.S. tank fire and bombs during the first week of the war.
Doctors said
they have no exact documentation, but estimated that 300 civilians were
killed in Nasiriyah and 1,000 people were wounded. They said most of
the patients were discharged from the 400-bed hospital, but 60 remained
on the hospital's third floor.
"I was
shot by the Americans," said Akeel Kadhim, 20, a student whose
left leg was amputated. "I was running to another wounded person,
trying to save him. . . . We are innocent. We were not fighting. We
were not resisting. I tried to save an innocent person. Why did they
shoot me?"
In the next
bed, Hassan Aoda, 28, said he was riding on a bus with 28 other Iraqis
when a U.S. armored vehicle opened fire on them at a road crossing on
March 25. "I don't know why they shot at us," he said, lying
on his back and nursing a fractured left shoulder and arm. "I'm
an innocent person. I wasn't fighting the Americans."
He added, "I'm
not angry. I'm angry at Saddam Hussein."
© 2003
The Washington Post Company