The propaganda wing says 54 fedayeen fighters died. The truth is more wiggly, and not intended to hide with warm, bloody feelings the fact that November was a month of death in Iraq.
Here's one post from the Soldiers for the Truth web site that supposedly comes from one of the soldiers on the ground. Instead of a "battle," this was a rolling convoy that just fired on any building where enemy fire might be coming from, sort of like those arcade games where your jet fighter is loaded down with every weapon and you just hit all the buttons at the same time. However did they figure out 54? Roll some dice?
This is a great attitude for a combat commander to have when fighting an armored force on force, but Colonel Rudesheim is not trained in Counter-Insurgency and my soldiers are taking the heat. We drive around in convoys, blast the hell out of the area, break down doors and search buildings; but the guerillas continue to attacks us. It does not take a George Patton to see we are using the wrong tactics against these people. We cannot realistically expect that Stability and Support Operations will defeat this insurgency.As one would expect from using our overwhelming firepower, much of Samarra is fairly well shot up. The tanks and brads rolled over parked cars and fired up buildings where we believed the enemy was. This must be expected considering the field of vision is limited in an armored vehicle and while the crews are protected, they also will use recon by fire to suppress the enemy. Not all the people in this town were hostile, but we did see many people firing from rooftops or alleys that looked like average civilians, not the Feddayeen reported in the press. I even saw Iraqi people throwing stones at us, I told my soldiers to hold their fire unless they could indentfy a real weapon, but I still can't understand why somebody would throw a stone at a tank, in the middle of a firefight.
Since we did not stick around to find out, I am very concerned in the coming days we will find we killed many civilians as well as Iraqi irregular fighters. I would feel great if all the people we killed were all enemy guerrillas, but I can't say that. We are probably turning many Iraqi against us and I am afraid instead of climbing out of the hole, we are digging ourselves in deeper.
Meanwhile, a report in the Scotsman says that locals say that there have only been three bodies seen in the Samarra morgue and maybe only a few people killed. So who the hell knows?
But didn't it make you feel good while you went Christmas shopping?