NY Times, Mar. 28, 2003 A FOOTHOLD A Village Is Bloodied in a Stubborn Battle By STEVEN LEE MYERS
KIFL, Iraq, March 27 — The concussive force of the tanks' rounds sucked everything off the sidewalks and into the middle of this village's narrow, dusty main road — "even people," the captain of a tank company who fought his way through it said.
The blasts shattered the plate glass window of a small barbershop, next to the girls' elementary school, on the roof of which Iraqi troops had built a redoubt of sandbags. Inside the barbershop were three chairs and pictures of haircuts — most out of style.
On the back wall, incongruously, hung a large poster of lower Manhattan, seen from the New Jersey waterfront, with the World Trade Center intact.
It was not one of the kind sold in souks across the Arab world, with a glaring Osama bin Laden or the airliners crashing into the twin towers. Rather, with palm trees and sand in the foreground, it was a picture of paradise — Manhattan on the Euphrates.
The tank captain had five words to describe his company's push through this village on Wednesday afternoon, just as the sun set in the middle of a sandstorm, turning the sky blood orange: "a little piece of hell."
The captain did not want his name used, only his radio sign, Cobra Six. He has a wife home alone in Fort Benning, Ga., and he worries about her.
Army forces seized a toehold here beginning late Monday night. Their blocking action was supposed to be a relatively simple one, intended to prevent Iraqi reinforcements from reaching Najaf, a city of 100,000 across the Euphrates River 12 miles away that the Third Infantry Division was in the process of encircling.
Seventy-two hours later the division has a foothold, but the fight is far from over, tying down an ever-growing number of troops that had been preparing for an assault on Baghdad, 75 miles to the north.
The dead now make a trail through town. A sedan, its paint burned off, rested where it had lurched to a stop in front of the barbershop. Inside were two charred skeletons of Iraqis.
Two more Iraqis died along the alley beside the girls' school. On either side of the road were still more burned, bullet-pocked cars and trucks, some with bodies inside, one with a soldier who had fallen half out.
The American military's policy is to pack the dead in black bags to be taken to makeshift morgues for identification and, someday, repatriation. Here, there has been no time for it.
"Every time we clear guys, more come," said Col. William F. Grimsley, commander of the division's First Brigade, whose troops are trying to hold several miles around Kifl.
The Euphrates here runs gently south toward Najaf, its deep green waters lined on either side with marsh grass and groves of palms. It might have been a pastoral idyll except for the pop of gunfire today.
Iraqi forces had tried to blow up a bridge here early Tuesday, but the plastic explosives packed inside the columns only buckled the structure. Iraqis came back under darkness early today to try again, hoping to isolate the forces of the Third Division that, for a third day, had been steadily crossing it.
Three Iraqis died on the bridge in a firefight that ensued. Today their bodies lay in mangled heaps, wrenched by their last steps. One dead man, face down, clutched his eyeglasses in front of him.
The village seemed deserted today; its schools, its mosque, its markets, its bank empty and eerily silent.
But the Iraqis keep fighting. Their forces are made up of irregulars and, today, soldiers from Iraq's Republican Guard, evidently sent to bolster Najaf's resistance.
"It sort of depends on how you define enemy," Capt. Darren A. Rapaport, commander of Company C of the Second Battalion, 69th Armored, replied when asked if enemy forces were in the village.
"He could be right around the corner," Captain Rapaport said, sitting atop his tank, its turret scanning the village's mud-brick buildings. "He could be up the street. He could be a few kilometers down the road."
In the first week of the war here, most certainties have evaporated.
A few minutes after Captain Rapaport spoke, the deep thuds of explosive rounds fired by a Bradley fighting vehicle exploded nearby, bursting around some unseen enemy and sending a tuft of black smoke above the palms. Another Bradley stopped and turned, grinding steel tracks on the asphalt, and headed past the town hall with an old Iraqi flag still flying above it.
The American forces controlled the bridge and the main road through the village. But officers had little desire to venture into the warren of narrow side streets where fighters could appear at any time.
"Son of a bitch is still shooting at us," said Lt. Col. Jeffrey Randall Sanderson of Waynesville, N.C., the commander of the Second Battalion, 69th Armor, said. "I'm not going to clear the village. I'm not going to put American soldiers in there. I'll be here a month and a half."
But Iraqi fighters were coming from outside the town as well. Through the early morning, scores of troops poured down the road from Baghdad. Intelligence reports said there were as many as 1,000. Some came in military jeeps, but most were in civilian trucks used as troop transports. Soldiers here have started calling them "technicals" after the trucks, bristling with weapons, that fighters used in Somalia.
Somalia seemed to be on everyone's mind.
Colonel Grimsley said it was his first thought after hearing that the Iraqis had nearly succeeded in destroying the bridge. The captain who wants to be known as Cobra Six said he thought of firebombs raining down on his tanks as they churned through Kifl's narrow main street.
"Tanks aren't supposed to go through that," he said of the village's confined spaces.
The battalion's lead units pushed north two miles up the road past the sign marking the entrance to the village. "Welcome to Kifl," it said. It was soon surrounded by tanks and armored vehicles, including ambulances for the wounded.
At a brick factory just north of Kifl, M1A1 tanks and Bradleys destroyed the Iraqi vehicles as they approached, relentlessly picking them off. Forward observers on the ground called in air strikes by A-10 attack planes that circled overhead.
Still, more vehicles came and unloaded more troops. An armored Humvee with a speaker blasted messages in Arabic, telling civilians to stay inside and soldiers to surrender.
"Your cause is lost," was repeated over and over.
"He's broadcasting, `Surrender, surrender, surrender,' and they ain't surrendering," Colonel Sanderson said. "I don't know why not. If they want to fight out, we'll fight it out."
Every time they played it, he added, it seemed the Iraqis fought harder.
"Hell," he said, "it's frustrating."
Cobra Six said he saw five Iraqis coming down the road on foot this morning. It was around 4 a.m. There were three men with weapons and two women. They did not stop. Three were killed, including one of the women. The other one, an old woman, was wounded in the leg and this afternoon was still being treated beneath the "Welcome to Kifl" sign.
Medics were trying to make her lie down on the stretcher. She wanted to drink, but rolled over and retched over the side.
Beside her was a soldier from the Republican Guard's First Division. He was shot in the stomach and both legs. He said 450 of the division's troops had been ordered south. "Saddam is a dog," he said before being evacuated to a field hospital.
Commanders here said that 60 to 70 Iraqis died from midnight to midday today. Colonel Sanderson said two of his men were slightly injured by fire from their fellow soldiers on the bridge last night in the confused firefight.
The road out of the village has two deep craters, the result of strikes by B-52's overnight. At a school near the brick factory, a tank driver shouted that he saw men on a sand berm about 1,000 yards away across a marsh. "Hey! There's some guys over there looking at us," he shouted.
Three scout Humvees and a Bradley slowly moved toward the group, three men with weapons. A few minutes later the Americans opened fire, pocking the berm with bullets and grenades. Spurts of water burst up from the marsh. It was not clear what happened to the fighters. It was not clear who they were.
With Iraqi fighters still emerging from the factory, Colonel Grimsley radioed for still more air strikes. A B-52 circling at 40,000 feet answered and 20 minutes later dropped a string of 500-pound bombs that hit with a shuddering thud, sending an enormous plume of black and gray smoke in the air.
The first barrage appeared to fall to the north, but the bomber circled around and, 10 minutes later, dropped a second string that landed between two of the factory's three towering chimneys. It was impossible to see or even hear the bomber.
Specialist Brandon D. Turner, Colonel Sanderson's driver, stood atop a tank and said that he saw four men coming out of the factory, their hands atop their heads.
"Are they trying to surrender?" the colonel asked.
"Looks that way," Specialist Turner said.
The colonel looked relieved.
"I believe," he said, "I'll have it secure here in a little while."
--
The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
