Appointment in Samarra

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It may 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 the Americans water. Elsewhere, heads kept popping out from front gates as quizzical residents — perhaps numbed after so many months of conflict — looked out at the commotion. "Get inside! Get inside!," soldiers screamed desperately. Children endlessly scampered across streets, forcing the troops to shoot above their heads. One old man carrying a mop sauntered between the lines. "These people are crazy," said a sergeant.

But the 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 and withdrew," says Captain Jim Pangelinan, who led his Alpha Company of the 1/14 into the western edge of the city. Withdrawing, however, can be the most confounding thing the insurgents do.

Al-Zarqawi's fighters think nothing of the martyrdom that comes from dying in battle, and if they simply vanished this time, U.S. forces will surely see them again. "Our worst-case scenario is where we have an enemy who is not coming out to fight," says Pangelinan.

Many of the rebels are probably still lurking in the city, hoping to blend back in or waiting for their chance to flee. It is now up to Iraqi forces to sniff them out. Some insurgents may have already been nabbed making their getaway — like six men who were captured in a boat crossing a river on Saturday — but it's hard to tell because once they put down their weapons, they could just as easily be seen as civilians. When a platoon was ambushed on a residential street late on Friday — triggering a blazing exchange between two U.S. units — four unarmed men emerged an hour later claiming they had merely been out shopping. "I say we just kill 'em anyway," a rifleman who had been part of the friendly-fire incident darkly joked.

In a 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.