As heavy artillery shells sliced so close that their rotating fins fizzed and crackled in the air just seconds before smashing into the earth with a terrifying boom less than 500 metres away, a group of American Green Berets jumped into their Land Rover pick-up and roared out of range, writes Lynne O'Donnell in Ghazer, northern Iraq.
"Load 'em up," shouted one, as another shell pounded into the ground. "It's starting to get hairy." Another soldier held his communications handset to his mouth. "Negative," he said into it. "We're just gonna kinda hold here, all around and back in the south of the road and hook up. I'm on the way. They're hitting way behind you. Drive down the left hand side of the road. See you in a minute."
For four days, 10 Green Beret commanders backed by 99 Kurdish peshmerga fighters have skirmished for control of a slice of rutted red clay and a nondescript and now-deserted town called Ghazer on the northern plain of Iraq.
As the Iraqis have withdrawn from positions across a line of a few hundred kilometres, the Americans and their lightly-armed Kurdish comrades, who know every fissure and bump in the landscape, have moved forward to take what the enemy has left to them. "This isn't like an advance," said one of the Green Berets in an impromptu battlefield interview. "It's more like as they retreat and they're pushed back we're basically pursuing and filling in their positions. Whenever they try to counter attack we hammer them with air support," he said.
A few kilometres at a time over the past week, the Iraqis have continued their retreat down the road to the most important city of the north, Mosul, where two armies, the 3rd and 4th, totalling 80,000 troops are preparing to defend the city against an expected full-blown allied advance that threatens to develop into a bloody siege.
After leaving the Kalak ridge 20 km south-east of Mosul on Wednesday night, the Iraqis moved back 15 km to Ghazer, from where they let loose a barrage of heavy artillery fire that drove the peshmerga back to Kalak and killed two civilians.
On Friday, the Iraqis moved another 10 km back, to the tiny Christian enclave of Bartala, ancestral home of the Iraqi deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, who was described by Richard Butler, the former UN weapons inspector, as a "vain, arrogant bully" with a "repulsive" physical presence. The peshmerga, convinced the Iraqis were on their home stretch to Mosul, prepared to moved into Ghazer and declare it liberated territory.
But under cover of heavy fire, specifically from a manually-operated, Austrian-made D-30 artillery gun that the Iraqis appear to be dragging back and forth along the undulating ridges and which has a range of around 25 km, they moved back into Ghazer early on Saturday morning.
The battle to secure the town, whose only landmark of note is an electricity sub-station, began anew, with Iraqi shelling over the verdant, clover-covered hills, and the vapour trails of American bombers melting into the overcast sky.
What had looked like being a simple mopping-up exercise to secure emptied ground had been transformed into a bitter battle for control of Ghazer. The Iraqis moved in tanks and stepped up their shelling. The peshmerga brought in reinforcements from nearby Badarash, a few hundred members of the Harki tribe known for their ruthlessness.
For two hours yesterday, hell in the form of smart bombs was unleashed on the camouflaged Iraqi positions, difficult to spot in the undulating terrain.The Americans have been impressed with the tenacity and agility of the Iraqis.