Word: samarra
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...first hours of Operation Baton Rouge, as the assault on Samarra was code named, the insurgents would not even have known about the thousands of troops, heavy armor and attack helicopters massing against them. Any column entering the city could easily have been taken for just another patrol or sweep. But as early as Monday, a brigade-size contingent was quietly forming around the city...
...14th Infantry Regiment. Stationed in Kirkuk to the north, the 1/14 battalion knows something about the feints and vanishing acts of the insurgents, having faced them in Najaf, Tall 'Afar and elsewhere. The 1/14 would follow the 1st Battalion of the 26th Infantry Regiment, which would hit Samarra first, crossing a long bridge leading into the city to secure a staging area for the troops that would pour in afterward. Just past midnight on Friday morning, the 1/26 moved. The 1/14, not far behind, heard the firing...
...have been--but for both sides. The scene in Samarra was similar to those anywhere in Iraq in which soldiers have had to shoot into cities. In one intersection, the body of a rebel lay in pieces, torn apart by 25-mm cannon fire, while a mother hurried by holding her toddler by the hand. The child stared at the remains. At one point, a group of Purdy's men tumbled into an Iraqi house seeking safety and found themselves facing a woman with her arms around five children. Figuring that the soldiers would not harm her family, she offered...
...messy warfare produced quick results, or at least it appeared to. More than 100 rebels were said to have been killed, and the city, for the most part, was quickly brought back under military control--with the Iraqi troops taking special care to seize Samarra's Golden mosque, denying the rebels the kind of rallying point they had had when they hunkered down in the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf. Although fighting continued throughout the afternoon and sporadically into Friday night, the enemy simply seemed to evaporate afterward. "By about [2:00 p.m.] they realized what they were up against...
...measure of the looking-glass standards that have come to be applied in this increasingly makeshift war, Iraqi Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib told a press conference on Saturday that the battle for Samarra had been a "very clean" operation. That may be, but if so, American planners won't want to see messy...