"We Are Slaughtering Them"

By Jim Lacey; Brian Bennett; Michael Ware; Alex Perry; Simon Robinson; Sanjay Gupta, M.D.

On the Road to Death at Najaf NAJAF JIM LACEY

The 2nd brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division planned to halt west of Najaf, about 100 miles south of Baghdad; it also planned on facing some resistance from local irregulars. What it didn't expect was a rush-hour-like Iraqi attack, the road dense with enemy trucks bearing down on the brigade. "My headquarters had just rolled into the objective area when 10 pickup trucks loaded with men firing machine guns and RPG-7s came racing down the road," recalls Colonel David Perkins, commander of the 2nd Brigade. "My lead tanks blew up the first three vehicles, but the rest kept coming."

For hours, the Iraqis continued this furious drag race--floor it and fire--whipping down the road from Najaf into the waiting guns of the 2nd Brigade's M1 Abrams tanks. The M1s obliterated them. Says Perkins: "I didn't expect this many of them, but all that meant was we used up more ammo. And I have plenty of that, especially if it means not fighting these guys in Baghdad."

Iraqi irregulars have tried everything to get at 2nd Brigade soldiers. When two Bradley fighting vehicles got stuck in the mud, dozens of irregulars, armed with a machine gun, tow missiles and a chain-firing cannon, tried to crawl up to them. Another group attempted to paddle across the Euphrates river, shooting RPGs as they approached. Their five boats were blown apart on the water. All of these attacks ended similarly. "It's not a fair fight," says Major Kevin Dunlop. "Trucks with machine guns against tanks and Bradleys can only have one outcome. We are slaughtering them."

On the other side of the Euphrates, east of Najaf, the 7th Cavalry ran into an even bigger fight. This time the main attack came during a swirling dust storm that made thermal night sights useless. Iraqi irregulars swarmed around the U.S. forces. The Americans were ordered to stay put and shoot at anything that moved. By midnight it was over. Two U.S. tanks were lost, blasted from behind--their most vulnerable spot--by antiaircraft guns mounted on pickups. Because of the M1's unique armor, no one on either tank was injured. And one of the tanks is recoverable.

The next rush-hour attack came right after dark the next day, but by this time the 2nd Brigade had set up "toll-booths"--heavy armor--on the roads leading from Najaf. "They attacked like morons," says Perkins. "But they kept coming." In one area guarded by two Bradleys, several hundred Iraqis were killed, according to the local battalion headquarters.

Civilians, meanwhile, continually wandered out of town to encourage and even beg the U.S. soldiers to take Najaf. They said fedayeen irregulars were forcing local members of the al-Quds militia to fight by gathering their families and threatening to shoot them if they did not oppose the Americans. At one point, locals came out to thank the Americans for killing the area's Baath party leader, who they said had been executing civilians. The Baath leader, they said, had been killed in an air strike on a fedayeen stronghold.

By the next morning, Perkins estimates, his unit had killed more than 1,200 attackers and taken the fight out of the rest. At first light, an Iraqi colonel walked up to an American position and surrendered. "He was a POW in the last Gulf War, so he had practice in surrendering when things are going bad," says Captain Cary Adams. The Iraqi colonel said he had only 200 of his 1,200 men left and claimed that originally there had been two other brigades in the town. One moved out during the night toward Baghdad, he said, while the other was hunkered down in government buildings around the city.

As the Iraqi attacks died down, the 101st Airborne Division began arriving to release the armored units for other missions. Brigadier General Benjamin Freakley, assistant division commander of the 101st, briefed the leaders of the companies that would be encircling Najaf. Everyone expected the remaining fedayeen to attempt a break toward Baghdad even if it meant running the 101st's gauntlet. But if the fedayeen stayed and conscripted the locals at gunpoint again, Freakley faced a moral conundrum: "Imagine someone walking into your home and saying either you fight or we will kill your wife and daughters. They are doing what any man would do to protect his family." It won't be easy killing men who are doing that.

Battle Scars of a Fallen Air Base SOUTHERN IRAQ BRIAN BENNETT

During the preflight briefing, the commanding officer is pounding home the landing advice. "Don't go north of there, don't go east of there, don't go west of there," Lieut. Colonel Mark Casburn tells the gathered crew whose HC-130 I am about to board. "Come in from the south, and leave from the south."

"There" is a newly captured air base in southern Iraq the coalition is rebuilding to relieve pressure on the 200-mile supply line into Iraq from Kuwait that has been subject to constant Iraqi harassment. And getting "there" in the lumbering HC-130, a big, slow target for surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), means flying about 300 feet above the desert and passing through a gauntlet of Iraqi radar systems. Because of all the surface-to-air-missile beacons in the area, alarms go off in the cabin. And one pesky mobile SAM battery has been roaming around and targeting incoming planes for weeks--hence the southern approach, coming in above a stretch of remote desert that is patrolled by coalition forces. When we land, the HC-130 doesn't even pause long enough to stop its four propellers. It dumps a cargo of Air Force engineers, some electrical wiring and tents, and takes off in a hurry.

The Iraqis left this place in a hurry too. Bedsheets are still twisted in the sleeping quarters. Boots lie on the floor, and papers are strewn across airfield offices. But the unfriendly forces haven't gone far. On Thursday about 100 were discovered huddled in underground tunnels, hoping to be found by American and not Iraqi forces. Firefights routinely break out on the front lines, a few miles to the north.

Besides serving as a supply depot staging area, chemical-and biological-weapons detection lab, and a medevac point, the liberated air base now has a hospital. Behind the newly erected surgical unit, hospital chief Colonel Harry Warren shows me three large crates full of Iraqi gas masks found on the base; stamped inside the unused masks are the words MADE IN GERMANY.

If a gas attack comes, he'll need them for doctors and patients alike. The nearby fighting has created a steady stream of patients. Surgery goes on nonstop all day. Warren, an orthopedic surgeon, just operated on a 5-month-old Iraqi girl, who was later airlifted to the hospital ship U.S.S. Comfort. She was in her mother's arms when shrapnel passed through both her feet. Her mother didn't survive. Says Warren: "We didn't expect to be operating on children here."

Khalid, a 43-year-old Iraqi, won't give his last name for fear of reprisal if Saddam's regime survives. He has a bullet wound in his right calf. He says that five days before troops entered Iraq, fedayeen forces came to the home of his extended family in Diwaniyah, kicked in the door and took all the men between the ages of 20 and 60. Khalid was later taken to Nasiriyah, where he and a ragtag group of some 40 civilians were handed old Kalashnikovs without ammunition and pushed in front of Iraqi soldiers as they faced down an advancing U.S. armored division. "If we turned back to run away from the Americans, Saddam's men would shoot us," he says. "We had no choice."

Abbas, 30, a carpenter and father of two, says his whole family was mowed down at once. His story: fedayeen in civilian clothes rolled an antiaircraft gun into his backyard. Abbas, having seen his neighbor protest and get a bullet in the head in front of his children, didn't say a word. "They started firing at American helicopters," he says. "The Americans started returning fire ... We had to leave."

Abbas loaded his family into their Peugeot station wagon and started speeding away. They were immediately shot up. It could have been the U.S. helicopter that had just dodged fire coming from his house. "I don't know who shot us," says Abbas, who has a white bandage wrapped around his head. "But I know the Americans saved my life." Abbas was picked up by a Black Hawk helicopter and flown to the base. His wife is in the hospital with him. His brother was evacuated to the Comfort. The five kids in the car all were killed.

Major Geracci, 35, a flight surgeon, knows that his Cobra attack-helicopter pilots caused some civilian casualties. "All the choppers see when they fly over Nasiriyah are civilians shooting Kalashnikovs out of their windows," says Geracci. "The pilots were talking about blowing up houses the next time they went in. They need to know that the civilians are not fighting against them." But the sound of mortar fire in the distance that night makes it clear that there are plenty of Iraqis out there who are.

Battling Terrorists in the Hills NORTHERN IRAQ MICHAEL WARE

The battle rages, fierce and bloody, perhaps the heaviest fighting northern Iraq has seen so far in this war. U.S. special forces are here, along with their Kurdish allies, facing down Ansar al-Islam, the diehard terrorist group based in Kurdish-controlled Iraq that the Americans believe is linked to al-Qaeda. "There are three or four isolated pockets of Ansar on very high ground. We're closing in on them from everywhere we can," says an American commando named Mark, who declined to give his rank or surname. All Saturday afternoon the Ansar fighters rain down sniper and machine-gun fire from a craggy peak high above the Americans. From the flat plains about two miles below, pro-American Kurds return artillery fire.

Positioned on a mountainside in between, the Americans unleash their own barrage. During four hours of battle, I saw U.S. forces drill Ansar with mortars, heavy machine-gun and antiaircraft artillery, 40-mm grenades and 500-lb. bombs dropped from planes overhead. Still, the fire was returned by an enemy clearly visible through binoculars. At one stage an Ansar defender screamed, "God is Great," even as grenades and heavy rounds peppered the cave he had ducked into.

Special-forces marksmen joined the battle. Three of them took positions behind a rock, patiently waiting to sight their Ansar counterparts far above. "There's a sniper playing with us," said one. The Americans' high-powered rifles cracked intermittently. When the incoming rounds finally ceased, the American snipers picked themselves up. "I think between us we smoked three guys, sir," one said. "Oh, at least," said another.

It was the latest in a running battle waged since Ansar had been driven from its front line in the lowlands. A day earlier, about 100 U.S. soldiers had joined with Kurdish peshmerga (those who face death) in an assault against Ansar's base. The U.S. bombs flattened a mosque in the village of Biarra that had been used as terrorist headquarters, replete with a gun pit on top. The assault capped a week of pummeling by American Tomahawk cruise missiles that prompted the al-Qaeda-linked militants to take to the snowy mountains bordering Iran. This corner of northeastern Iraq, near the town of Halabja, is rough territory, a no-man's-land of escape routes and caves impervious to all but the mightiest bombing.

The assault clearly took a toll on Ansar's militants. Politburo member Mahmood Sangarwi of the pro-American Patriotic Union of Kurdistan says 60 dead were left behind after Friday's battles. In the rocky terrain of Saturday's exchange I saw eight more slain Ansar fighters. Some had died in their bunkers; others were cut down as they fled over open ground or among relatively exposed rocky outcrops. Their corpses remained where they had fallen throughout the assault.

In the end, however, the battle for Halabja seemed inconclusive. President Bush last week referred to the destruction of Ansar's base as one of the war's important early achievements. But it may be a limited one. In Halabja, U.S. commando Mark says, "A lot of the senior cadre fled a long time ago, leaving a fanatical hard core to stay for the last stand. They had little intention of surviving." The Americans blasting away at the holdouts recognize this and lament opportunities lost. "This is my second time in northern Iraq," says a special-forces soldier. "I should be in Tampa with my wife enjoying spring break. Instead I'm here, and I wouldn't be if we'd done this right the first time."

For Charlie Rock, No Hero's Welcome AS SAMAWAH ALEX PERRY

Charlie Rock company's patch of desert has been quiet for 24 hours when First Sergeant William Mitchell hears something on the radio. His face stiffens with the information. He leans out of the wind into his half-track, wincing at the sandstorm whipping around his face from the rear. He grabs his M-4 assault rifle and halfway out of the track's back door yells at his master gunner, Sergeant Robert Jones, "You need to call HQ right now and tell them we have 10 men, 200 meters to the north, with AKs and RPGs." Jones jumps on the radio. "Break, break, this is Checkpoint Zero, Zero, Two, Two. We have possible contact with enemy soldiers. We are checking it out and moving into position now." The reply is instant. "Zero, Zero, Two, Two, this is Battle Five. If you have positive IDs, do not wait for them to fire. Destroy them."

Outside, Mitchell links up with Lieut. Robert Carnahan and two six-man squads from White Platoon carrying M16s, heavy SAWs (squad automatic weapons) and 240-Bravo machine guns. Flanking them are three Bradley fighting vehicles. Mitchell, 34, briefs his men that a passing farmer has told a sentry about 10 men sweeping around for an ambush. On his command, the Americans run north through the choking red dust and throw themselves on the ground against a nearby railway track. "Jesus, we can't see s___!" says Carnahan. The squads hold their positions as the bradleys scan the area with thermal imagers. Nothing. Carnahan then gets a call from brigade. "We have a new mission," he announces to his men. "We're pulling out and moving back east to another checkpoint." Pause. "Dammit. Pull back again?"

When the commanders of the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division spoke to their men on the eve of war, they talked about being the fighting vanguard of a force that would be "liberating" Iraq. In the ranks, the soldiers ate it up. They envisioned scenes like the liberation of Paris, with jubilant locals welcoming them.

Instead, Charlie Rock is guarding swatches of desert where danger swirls like sand devils and then disappears. Sure, kids still pester the troops for candy and water. But the grownups aren't in a hospitable mood. In fact, small groups of Iraqi soldiers, many in plain clothes, are letting the heavy metal pass--70-ton M1A1 Abrams tanks and Bradley troop carriers--and lying in wait for the soft-skinned, lightly armed trucks hauling fuel, food and water. Every day, the journey to Baghdad stretches ever longer as Charlie Rock and other units like it that expected to be on the front line are finding themselves policing a road and facing dogged Iraqi resistance. There were seven attacks last week on the 800-strong task force of which Charlie Rock is part. Welcome, liberators.

A growing number of Iraqi ambushers have been captured or killed. But Charlie Rock remains riled up by news of the American maintenance crew some 30 miles away that may have made a wrong turn, leading to the deaths, possibly by execution, of seven soldiers and the capture of five others. The grunts are furious. Iraqi deserters or scouts unfortunate enough to come across Charlie Rock's newly ordered checkpoints are bearing the brunt of the company's outrage. "Don't look at me. Don't f___ing look at me, or I swear to god I'll cut you in half," yells Sergeant Patrick Dunleavy at Khaled, 23, who says he is fleeing Baghdad and who, from his uniform, appears to be a republican guard deserter. "Man, sometimes I wish we didn't have the Geneva Convention. You see what they did to our guys?"

The soldiers of Charlie Rock have learned to treat every Iraqi they come across as a potential enemy. The unit's commander, Captain Jorge Melendez, 31, thinks the guerrilla attacks will continue sporadically for "two or three months." Mitchell had hoped to be back in the U.S. by mid-April after three months in Kuwait, but he has resigned himself to a long, frustrating and bloody haul. "I've stopped telling her when I think I'll be home," says Mitchell, pointing to the picture of his wife Melina and son Garrett, 10, that is strapped to the outside of his left arm. "All I know is, home is after Baghdad. And god knows when that'll be."

Taking Iraq, One Village at a Time AT TAHRIR SIMON ROBINSON

In Vietnam, it was known as the village-pacification program: Marines in the Combined Action Program first took out Charlie and communist sympathizers, and then tried to convince the villagers that life would be swell now that the bad guys were gone.

In the central Iraqi region of Al Qadisiyah, the mostly Shi'ite population isn't likely to buy this approach so easily. In the second week of the campaign, advancing coalition troops faced up to one of the fundamental miscalculations of the early days of the war: blasting conventional Iraqi forces hasn't been enough. They also have to go into towns and take out Baath Party officials and fedayeen fighters loyal to Saddam. Only then can one even begin to talk about prospects of local people--circumspect after the U.S. encouraged previous uprisings that were later crushed--partying in the streets. "Only when there is physical presence can people feel safe," says Sergeant Major David Howell, with 3/4 Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment.

So here in Al Qadisiyah, the hearts-and-minds exercise is a priority, since the Marines need to secure two towns and two hamlets along a road linking a pair of north-south highways in the vicinity. The area forms a picture of rustic simplicity: donkeys tied up next to mud-brick houses, children playing near a canal, a young girl in a pink dress and a pink cardigan chasing a cow through her garden.

Tanks with nicknames such as Carnivore and Prom Queen roll into the first hamlet, and the Marines fan out, searching houses. A loudspeaker blasts a message in Arabic: Stay in your houses. We are here to help. "This is a place taken out of thousands of years ago when Jesus was walking the earth still," says Corporal Omar Monge, 20, driver for the battalion commander, Lieut. Colonel Bryan P. McCoy. A village elder approaches the battalion translator. Tell everyone not to be scared, he is told. But tell them if they shoot one bullet they will be very scared. We will shoot 2,000 bullets back.

At the hamlet of Hajil, American helicopters overhead report white pickups, the preferred ride for the fedayeen, leaving town. A yellow-and-white taxi makes the mistake of pulling out in front of a tank, and the machine gunner opens up. Rounds explode across the car, and the driver is hit in the thigh and the back. He is treated and medevacked out.

The resistance comes a few minutes later. The convoy stops south of Afak, the first big town, fearing that a local bridge may not support the tanks. Men are seen running through a field and a date-palm grove, north of the road. A machine gunner atop a tank starts shooting, and suddenly the air is ripped by bullets. The copters dance over the field, firing down. McCoy bounds into the palm grove, lobs a grenade over a small berm and opens fire on a group of men. When the shooting stops, Marines spread through Afak while human exploitation teams, U.S. soldiers who collect information, start interviewing locals. A group of Iraqis hanging out in front of a run-down gas station tell the Marines that all is cool, but clearly it is not. "Will this be a place where you Americans will stay, or will the Iraqis, the Baath Party, come back?" one of them asks. "I need to know before I can speak."

Help us and you will be safe, the translator tells him. They aren't convinced. "They are scared we will leave them like we did the first time," says the translator, referring to what happened in 1991. Yet they reveal a critical piece of info: the location of the local Baath Party headquarters a few kilometers down the road, near At Tahrir.

When the troops arrive there, the two-story green-and-lime building housing the Baath Party seems deserted. Then a sniper across the road starts firing on the convoy and is answered. The battalion pours through the streets, grabbing two teens who tell the troops that 250 to 450 armed Baathists have headed east, the last of them having left as the Marines arrived. The teams collect names of party officials and details on their vehicles and weapons. The biggest find: a book listing the names of all local Baath officials.

By day's end, the tally is eight or nine enemy dead, two civilians wounded, at least a dozen POWs and cheering Iraqis along the roads. It will take many more missions like these to find and disarm the scattering enemy.

At the Front with the Devil Docs CAMP VIPER SANJAY GUPTA, M.D.

No, it didn't occur to me that the missile flying over Camp Iwo Jima in the northern Kuwaiti desert might not be friendly. I'm a doctor, a medical correspondent, not a bang-bang journalist. But I noticed all the Marines around me were hitting the deck. Five seconds later, the alarm "Bunker! Bunker! Bunker!" blared over the p.a. system. Over the next 20 hours, I would share with 70 Marines and two CNN colleagues the same space and the same occupation: target.

We were at Camp Iwo Jima on our way to spend time with the Devil Docs, the military's nickname for a group of physicians who set up a groundbreaking approach to battlefield medical care called the Forward Resuscitative Surgical Suite. The idea is to provide real surgery at the front lines during the so-called golden hour, when proper treatment gives wounded soldiers the best chance of recovery.

The Devil Docs had already moved forward with the first advance, so to catch up with them we rode in the bed of an open 7-ton truck--lined with sandbags in case we hit a mine--for 17 hours. Their base, Camp Viper, in south-central Iraq, had a team of 44 medical personnel, including doctors, nurses, medics and corpsmen. I toured the two 40-ft. by 40-ft. operating tents, each reinforced with two layers of tent canvas and a solid floor. They were clean and sanitary, as any operating room should be.

A few hours after I arrived, a helicopter dropped off a soldier with a gunshot wound to the abdomen. He was an Iraqi prisoner. The young man was immediately taken to the operating room, with CNN providing live coverage. "Medical triage, not political triage," said Dr. John Perciballi, the lead surgeon. During my six-day stay, they treated 64 patients, 70% of whom were Iraqis, with injuries varying from gunshot wounds to broken limbs to amputation completions. This is difficult work even absent a war. Yet the surgeons sometimes operated wearing gas masks while alarms sounded in the distance.

Our tents were miserable, and the weather even worse. One day, the shamal winds stirred up a huge sandstorm. With gusts to 60 m.p.h., we could hear Marines pounding the loosening tent stakes back into the ground. Despite their efforts, one tent was blown over, scattering all the medical equipment.

Just when things had started to calm down, we were warned that Iraqi special-ops forces were nearby. We put on our helmets and Kevlar vests and hunkered down in our tents. There would be no air cover, given the weather. Our unit couldn't withstand an attack by tanks or grenades--hell, the wind nearly took us out.

The next 12 hours were the longest of my life, interrupted by a lone moment of courage: I had to go. Outside. I couldn't stop thinking that being picked off by a sniper while taking a leak would be a truly embarrassing way to die. Shortly thereafter, two British tanks moved into the area (now that's relief) and two Cobra helicopters arrived overhead, to cheers from the camp.

When I arrived back at my hotel in Kuwait I was told I had to do a live interview immediately with CNN's Wolf Blitzer. I was so overcome with emotion that I had to steady myself before answering his questions about the missile attack and the Devil Docs. At the end of the interview, he told me and all the viewers that I needed a shower because I didn't smell very good. For the first time in a long while, I smiled. I was now a war correspondent.