The Ambush
At noon Sunday, Marines were waiting on the bank of the Euphrates for U.S. Army engineers to finish erecting a temporary bridge when insurgents opened fire from Ubaydi, less than a mile away. They fired AK-47 assault rifles at helicopter gunships overhead and pounded the waiting Marines with mortar rounds -- including one that landed yards from a Humvee carrying the operation's commanding officers.
The Marines pressed against the walls of a ruined home for protection and waited for the mortars to stop. When they did, one officer said: "Let's go to Ubaydi."
Lima Company and a company from the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Regiment, entered the town. Insurgents -- dozens of them, Marines said later -- met them with AK-47 fire and rocket-propelled grenades. In the first hours, one Marine was killed and at least seven were wounded.
Lima Company battled its way through town, at one point exchanging fire with fighters on the roof of a mosque and forcing them down. The mosque's loudspeakers screamed Arabic that the Marines could not understand, but they said that since it was past time for prayers, they assumed the loudspeakers were rallying forces for attack.
According to Hurley and others who recounted the fighting that followed, Lima Company's Marines searched each house they passed. They turned up weapons cache after weapons cache: bombs made to be dropped from airplanes, a bicycle with a seat made of explosives and an antenna for remote-control triggering, a vest rigged with explosives, a car rigged with bombs, mortar tubes, rocket launchers with new backpacks full of rockets, artillery shells.
The costly equipment, as well as body armor later recovered from the bodies of dead insurgents, suggested that the fighters were foreigners, the military said. Though the level of foreigners' involvement in the insurgency has been disputed for nearly two years, Muslim men have come to Iraq from neighboring countries such as Saudi Arabia and from as far away as Chechnya and Indonesia to fight the United States and its allies.
The Marines also found Soviet-designed PKM machine guns and belts of armor-piercing ammunition. In contrast, Lima Company was armed with M-16 assault rifles and carried nothing comparable -- nothing that could penetrate walls and floors and still pack enough force to kill.
That was what awaited the Marines on the last block they cleared, at the last house. The first Marine there found the gate in the high walls around the house open; the front door was locked.
"As soon as he kicks the door, the machine-gun fire cuts him down," said Hurley, a Dayton, Ohio, police officer serving in the Marine Reserves. The Marine survived, but a second fell as well, fatally wounded. From inside, a foreign fighter fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the door.
At some point, the screamed prayers began: "Allahu Akbar" -- "God is great."
Marines fell, unable to tell the source of the screams or the shots. They fired blindly, as machine-gun rounds cratered the walls and floors around them.
"Our rounds couldn't get through the walls," Hurley said.
