Northern front Bodies, body parts and burned- out cars littered the streets of the small northern town of Ghazer yesterday after Iraqi troops cut and ran following a two-day pounding by American bombers, writes Lynne O'Donnell, in Kalak, northern Iraq
This followed a fierce battle in which they gave as good as they could before fleeing behind a shield of terrified civilians.
Unrelenting bombing sorties by teams of American Tomcat and Hornet fighter jets began anew with daylight after a night of heavy Iraqi shelling over the ridges occupied by hundreds of Kurdish peshmerga guerillas claimed the lives of at least two residents in nearby Kalak village.
Mortar and cannon fire created an intermittent acoustic backdrop as dawn broke on another dry, warm and hazy day over the Great Zab River which runs through Ghazer and feeds into the ancient Tigris.
But soon after 8 a.m., the unmistakable overhead moan of F-14 and FA-18 bombers began as the tiny black triangles soared in pairs across the whitened sky, circled the rugged red-clay hilltops twice before dropping their carefully targeted payload.
A group of young deserters who fled across Ghazer's two bridges to the relative safety of the Kurdish zone and took refuge in a concrete mosque in nearby Kalak village, said the non-stop air raids over six hours had finally driven the Iraqi loyalists from their yellow low-rise barracks and forced them into retreat once more.
"They weren't trying to target the buildings or tanks, they were directly aiming at us," said one of the defectors as he sat in a plastic chair recounting the ordeal of recent days. The peshmerga, who are now fighting solely under the command of US Special Forces troops who have directed similar precision operations against the Iraqi northern frontlines this week, were reinforced early in the day when about 300 men armed with Armalite rifles arrived in pick-ups on the ridges beyond Kalak.
From their vantage points less than a kilometre away, they watched as the frantic Iraqi troops, some of them in civilian clothing, rounded up the villagers, forced themselves into their cars and formed a confusing convoy which made it impossible to tell who was a combatant and who was not as it sped out of the village towards Mosul.
After edging forward through the day under cover of the aerial bombardment, the peshmerga moved gingerly into Ghazer just before 3 p.m.
Some of them swiftly began looting the deserted buildings, loading generators and petrol into their cars and roaring back to Kalak.
Others walked slowly around through a thick carpet of scissor-sharp shrapnel pieces towards the carcass of a smoking Toyota pick-up, hit hours earlier by a rocket-propelled grenade before its occupants could get halfway out of it to safety. A mutilated body lay metres away, a severed hand not far beyond.
Ghazer is the latest prize in the battle for the north. The Iraqi troops had been systematically abandoning their defensive positions east of Mosul and north of Kirkuk.
Yesterday they fled defeat. More than 120,000 Iraqi troops are now believed to have massed in and around the cities, backed with tanks and heavy weaponry.