Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 31, 1991 TAG: 9103310127
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: SAMAWAH OIL REFINERY, IRAQ LENGTH: Long
Republican Guard troops fired tank rounds into a hospital, used Soviet-made helicopters to strafe the town and shelled hundreds of civilians huddled in dry ditches south of a railway track inside the demarcation line. Green flags, the insignia of the Shiite Muslim rebel forces, which had fluttered on top of a white onion-shaped water tower, were gone.
The next day, all the U.S. troops could do was receive the wounded civilians. There were at least 40, mostly women and children, not only victims of shelling - random barrages meant to kill and terrorize - but from point-blank range shootings.
"It's very hard sitting here, not being able to do what we can," said Army Lt. Thomas Isom, 26, of Miami, Fla. "We have shown more discipline in the last four days than in the whole war. If they asked for volunteers, there is not a man here who would not go north to finish the job.
"There isn't a soldier here who does not want to finish it. They hate this," he said, expressing the torment felt by many American servicemen who, amid a declared peace in the Persian Gulf War, must sit passively as they watch enemy Iraqi troops kill trapped civilians.
The accounts of the soldiers, stationed on the rim of the Euphrates Valley - about 150 miles from the Kuwaiti border and near the tip of the 200-mile long sector held by American troops - confirmed gruesome tales of refugees and Iraqi deserters who have fled toward the Kuwaiti border over the past week from a brutal government crackdown on central and southern Iraqi towns.
An 18-month-old girl was "shot with a pistol in her left chest, up close enough for a powder burn," said Capt. Daniel Miller, 29, from Toledo, Ohio. A man, shot in the head, arrived with a bullet embedded in his jaw.
"We have had little kids brought to us, shot in the back, and women," said Isom, enraged by the experience of watching troops loyal to President Saddam Hussein attack Samawah as part of a campaign to crush a Shiite revolt that erupted March 4 following the end of the gulf war.
Among those treated were adults with severed limbs, two or three small children with their hands and fingers blown off, according to Sgt. Dickson Figueroa, 27, a medic. Miller said a small 8-year-old child had metal fragments in her back.
Survivors from Samawah told the Americans that most males above age 12 who were still in the town when the loyalist troops attacked were killed. Some managed to escape, sneaking out from Bedouin camps on the western edge of the railroad to the 55-mile stretch through the desert to the southbound highway.
Drawing parallels with the tactics of the German Gestapo security forces in Nazi Germany, Miller and Isom explained the action of Republican Guards taking over Iraqi cities: "They come if the town is unclean, meaning it is not pro-Saddam. It is defiled by the rebels," said Miller. Continued Isom: "If you are not them [the Republican Guards], you are unclean, and the only way to clean you is to kill you.".
"We cannot comprehend how soldiers can behave like that, go in and kill everyone over 12," said Isom. "These men are not soldiers. It is almost like genocide."
Late Friday, resistance fighters and distraught young men were wandering aimlessly, scavenging for water and food.
Abbas Musa, 25, a defeated resistance fighter, headed out amid a cluster of men staggering by the side of the road. "They burned our homes. Please find us a solution. We are dead men here. We will commit suicide if we cannot reach Safwan and leave Iraq."
"What happened in Kuwait is now happening in Iraq," said Musa's cousin, Abed, a high-school student. "Find us a solution. We are dying."
Another young man complained bitterly: "Allied planes were hovering above, but they did nothing. Our fate is unknown. We are in the throes of a catastrophe. We have no rights but famine, poverty and executions in the streets. What is our future?"
Haidar Qazem Ghali, an Iraqi deserter who had turned himself in to allied forces as a POW, stood up in the back of the truck, leaned over and asked: "Can we know what is at the end of the road for Saddam? So we can still have a drop of hope after we have left our families behind. Is there a solution?"
The battle for control of Samawah, one of the last Shiite rebel strongholds to fall in the Euphrates River sector, raged for three days until the town fell Thursday.
Resistance fighters tried to hold their ground with rifles and small machine guns against loyalist troops who pounded their positions with artillery and advanced into town with heavy armor. "They were out of ammunition and outgunned. You don't fight tanks and artillery with rifles," said Miller, commander of infantry troops of the Army's 3rd Squadron, 2nd Cavalry Regiment.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, Soviet-made H-I8 helicopters firing rockets were used against Samawah residents. "We could have used our own helicopters to take them out," he said. "We could hear them come over our heads."
Recalled Isom: "Several hundred people were living in the fields, in the ditches. They were shelled. We saw it. People were living there in tents and tarps.
"You could see the concrete coming out of the roofs. "They fired at the hospital twice. We were watching them shell the train station and other small houses. This was simply designed to kill civilians or terrorize them, which it did. It did not have a military purpose, just artillery impacts on large concentrations of civilians."
"If we leave, will they live?" asked Isom, as women clutching children giggled shyly and asked for medicine and water in the narrow passageways snaking through the refinery.
Miller looked sadly on the Iraqi refugees. "Seeing the adults is one thing. But when you see the little children, sitting there crying and bleeding, you want to go and take care of them."
There is little he can say to ease their pain. "I tell them, the war was to free Kuwait, it was not to free Iraq. That's the way it is."
by CNB