U.S. Sees Lesson for Insurgents in an Iraq Battle:
"Accounts of a three-hour battle fought in the alleys and streets of Samarra on Sunday diverged radically, with Iraqis saying only eight people had been killed, several of them civilians.

At the morgue, Adnan Sahib Dafar, 52, an ambulance driver, pointed to a dead woman on a steel tray. The woman, Mr. Dafar said, had worked at the city's big pharmaceutical factory and had walked into the crossfire between American forces and Iraqi guerrillas that began with an attempted ambush of an American military convoy.

'Is this woman shooting a rocket-propelled grenade?' he demanded, standing over the body. 'Is she fighting?' There was only one other body, that of a gray-bearded old man, in the morgue."

Speaking in Brussels at a NATO defense ministers' meeting, Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, portrayed the fight here, apparently the most deadly since Saddam Hussein was ousted in April, as a grim lesson for America's foes.

"They attacked, and they were killed," General Pace said of the insurgents. "So I think it will be instructive to them."

Speaking at the same meeting, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said such attacks were being mounted by "a limited number of people who are determined to kill innocent men, women and children." They are "being rounded up, captured, killed, wounded and interrogated," he said.

But on the streets of Samarra, an hour's drive north of Baghdad and just down the road from Tikrit, the hometown of Mr. Hussein, the lessons of the battle, and even its precise nature, seemed far from clear.

It appeared from the anger among Iraqis in Samarra that America faces a fundamental dilemma: As it steps up the pressure on the insurgents who are killing Americans and Iraqis in growing numbers, the very Iraqis they are trying to win over may be alienated.

"If I had a gun, I would have attacked the Americans myself," said Satar Nasiaf, 47, a shopkeeper who said he had watched two Iraqi civilians fall to American fire. "The Americans were shooting in every direction."


http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/02/international/middleeast/02IRAQ.html?pagewanted=all&position=