by Robert Fisk in Baghdad
And one with a heavy price to be paid in blood and life. By the time I turned up yesterday, the more obvious and terrible detritus of battle – the corpses and the blood and vomit – had been cleared away, but the Iraqi army and the Pentagon did their best to cloak this little killing field with lies. Two thousand Iraqis killed, crowed the Pentagon. Fifty Americans killed, boasted the Iraqis, rather more modestly. Both sides admitted "casualties" and it must be for the reader to judge what these might have been.
A 106mm Iraqi anti-tank gun, three armoured personnel carriers, again Iraqi, and more than 25 military trucks and Katyusha launchers, yes, once more Iraqi, were scattered in burning embers on the plains of dust and earth around the motorway just seven miles from the centre of Baghdad.
Even as I clambered over this mass of tortured and still red-hot metal, the American pilots came back, their invisible jets howling through the air above the battlefield. Then there was the American tank.
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