The Other Side of the Propoganda War

Agence France Presse has a curious article about this past weekend's fighting in Samarra, in northern Iraq. As it was reported over the weekend, US forces were escorting a convoy delivering new Iraqi dinars to local banks when they came under fire from fadayeen Saddam insurgents. After a fierce firefight lasting three or more hours, American forces had killed 46 or more of the insurgents and had sent a strong message to the insurgent movement. [link]

According to Agence France, however, there is a little problem: no one seems to be able to account for the bodies of the dead insurgents. [link] Officials at the one hospital in Samarra say that they only have the bodies of a handful of civilians in their morgue, but nothing like 46 or more insurgent soldiers. Residents who were supposedly near the fighting -- a shopkeeper and an ambulance driver -- likewise say that they saw no bodies. Even the New York Times, which reported that "strewn across the rubble" were "dozens of bodies, apparently all Iraqi, many wearing the uniforms of fedayeen paramilitary fighters loyal to the overthrown Hussein government" attributed that description to an Army spokesman, not to the reporter's own observation.

The US forces, meanwhile, didn't do a body count -- apparently, the death toll was calculated from "reports on the ground" (whatever that means), interviews with soldiers and counting how many AK-47s and RPGs the army "engaged". As a result, the army claims that it "can tell just how many people are returning fire".

What's more, Army officials can't seem to agree on the number of dead (one report has 46 dead and another has 54 dead), or why there don't seem to be any bodies. The best they can come up with is "I don't know". One general, Brigadier Gen. Mark Kimmett, was quoted as saying (I'm paraphrasing) that perhaps the insurgents who were left took the bodies back to whatever base they came from. Others who were interviewed said that they didn't stick around to pick up bodies or that that the question should be put to the fedayeen Saddam. These are hardly answers that inspire confidence in the military version of this story.

General Kimmett's story is particularly troubling because the numbers involved don't add up. In one version of the story, apparently, 60 insurgents attacked, 46 were killed and 11 were captured. This would leave three people to retrieve 46 bodies, which hardly seems plausible. Another version had 80 attackers, of whom 54 ended up dead, 22 were wounded and 1 was captured. With 13 insurgents unaccounted for, this would make removal of bodies slightly more plausible, but still questionable since such an operation would require not just people who can lift the bodies, but also one or more vehicles and time to carry out the mission undetected.

Regardless of the numbers, however, Gen. Kimmett's assumption that the bodies were removed by the insurgents has troubling implications. For one thing, it suggests that (a) that the fedayeen Saddam are sufficiently organized to have standing orders to collect their dead and evacuate their wounded to a central location (where, presumably, there is medical treatment available that does not depend on the local hospital); (b) there is an insurgent base that the US hasn't identified; and (c) the fedayeen Saddam were able to collect 46 bodies and take them to said base without being detected. For another thing, it suggests that the insurgents are more organized and more entrenched than the Pentagon and the White House would have us believe.

I don't know exactly whom to believe here. Still, it's something to think about.