Samarra Becomes Iraq Flash Point: How KR Reporter Covered It Recently

By: Greg Mitchell Last week, in a "Pressing Issues" column for E&P, I described an extraordinary article by Knight Ridder's longtime Baghdad correspondent Tom Lasseter. It recounted his recent 10 days embedded with U.S. troops in Samarra--scene of a holy shrine bombing today that is already triggering wide protests and fears of civil war in Iraq.

With this new relevance in mind, we re-publish much of that column below.

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One of the top American correspondents in Iraq, Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder, has written a gripping, and depressing, article distributed today and posted at the www.krwashington.com site.

E&P has profiled Lasseter and his work numerous times in the past two years, and last we heard he was supposed to be back home in the USA, but there he is, still risking life, limb and, no doubt, sanity in Iraq.

Based in Baghdad, Lasseter often gets embedded with U.S. or Iraqi troops out in the hellish beyond. Inevitably he gets ordinary grunts to speak honest truths. His latest piece focuses strictly on Samarra, a city that has lost half of its population of 200,000 since the U.S. supposedly pacified the area more than a year ago. Lasseter reveals the true costs?and the real chance that the death and destruction will go for naught.

Lasseter opens by observing that more than a year after some 5,000 Iraqi and U.S. soldiers re-took the city from the enemy, ?American troops still are battling insurgents in Samarra. Bloodshed is destroying the city and driving a wedge between the Iraqis who live there and the U.S. troops who are trying to keep order.

?Violence, police corruption and the blurry lines of guerrilla warfare are clouding any hopes of victory. ?It's apocalyptic out there. Life has definitely gotten worse for? Iraqis, said Maj. Curtis Strange, 36, of Mobile, Ala., who works with Iraqi troops in Samarra. ?You see Samarra and you almost want to build a new city and move all these people there.?

?Soldiers such as Sgt. Powell desperately want to reach out to the community, but they're mired in daily skirmishes. Residents have fled, and a 7-mile-long, 5-foot-high earthen wall that U.S. soldiers built around the city last August has failed to keep out the insurgents.

?Many of the American troops who patrol the city say they don't see much hope for Samarra. Some officers privately worry that the city will fall to insurgents as American troops withdraw." Already, roadside bomb attacks are increasing, with at least 15 going off in January.

And it?s hard to tell who is in the enemy. U.S. military officials suspect that many of the Iraqi soldiers, including a company commander, are on the insurgents' payroll, possibly in league with terror master Zargawi. Yet the 101st Airborne plans to hand over the town to the Iraqi police and army by July 1.

One recent day, which Lasseter describes in vivid detail, a .50-caliber machine gun, on the roof of a schoolhouse, manned by a 21-year-old Texan name Michael Pena blasted an unarmed man on the street into oblivion. Horrified soldiers rushed to the Iraqi, or what was left of him?his organs were now slithering out?and watched him die, as he praised god and muttered, ?Why? Why??

?Haji, I don?t know,? an American soldier replied.

A few days later, Lasseter finds the gunner, Pena, still manning the machine gun on the same roof. Pena doesn?t say a word about the man he killed but he is boiling with frustration.

"No one told me why I'm putting my life on the line in Samarra, and you know why they didn't?" Pena asks. "Because there is no f------ reason."