Exhaustion, bad weapons cited in Iraq ambush report

WASHINGTON - The US army unit that included Private Jessica Lynch was ambushed by Iraqi forces in March after the exhausted troops blundered into a "desperate situation" with guns that failed, according to army investigators.

A 15-page draft report of the investigation said many of the unit's M-16 rifles -- the army's standard weapon -- along with two types of machine guns malfunctioned during a fierce 90-minute battle in Nassiriya.

Eleven soldiers were killed and nine wounded in the highly publicised attack on the 507th Maintenance Company from Fort Bliss, Texas, losses the army said were sparked by "acute fatigue, isolation and the harsh environmental conditions" in a desert dash toward Baghdad in the Iraq invasion.

Lynch, 19, was captured by the Iraqis and later rescued. She is undergoing rehabilitation therapy at Walter Reed army Medical Centre in Washington.

Although earlier media reports suggested Lynch was badly wounded in a valiant personal firefight with attackers, the new army report said she sustained the injuries when the Humvee jeep in which she was riding was hit by gunfire and slammed into a tractor-trailer truck.

The investigation report, expected to be officially released this week, said a tired company commander misread his assigned route and that the unit took a wrong turn and became separated from a convoy of nearly 600 other vehicles sweeping north from the Kuwait border.

The unit, at times bogged down in sand, "found itself in a desperate situation due to a navigational error caused by the combined effects of the operational pace, acute fatigue, isolation and the harsh environmental conditions," investigators said.

"They fought the best they could until there was no longer a means to resist. They defeated ambushes, overcame hastily prepared enemy obstacles, defended one another, provided life-saving aid and inflicted casualties on the enemy."

The 15-page report was first carried on the website of the El Paso (Texas) Times and details have appeared in a number of other major US newspapers.

The investigators did not address accusations -- denied by defence officials -- that the Pentagon over-dramatised the subsequent rescue of Lynch and several of her comrades from a hospital in the area by elite US Special Operations troops.

But it said that a number of the soldiers who were attacked on March 23 reported weapons malfunctions that "may have resulted from inadequate individual maintenance in a desert environment." It did not elaborate.

One soldier attempted to return fire on the Iraqis with the unit's only 50-calibre machine gun, "but the weapon failed". That soldier was wounded in the leg while reaching for his M-16, the report said.

Investigators did not lay blame on human error or recommend punishment, but made clear the troops, exhausted by a movement of nearly 70 hours with little rest, were in no condition to overcome "an adaptive enemy" that paid little heed to what it called "the Law of War".

- REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq