The Instructive Lessons of Samarra

"They attacked, and they were killed," said General Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "I think it will be instructive to them."

But some Iraqi civilians are learning a different lesson. They are learning to hate their occupiers.

How many insurgents were killed we do not know.

But at least a few civilians were killed, including one seventy-one-year-old Shiite Iranian, who was on a pilgrimage to a mosque, and a woman who worked at a pharmaceutical factory.

Other civilians were injured, including a little boy with bullet holes in both his legs, according to a report in the London Independent.

"My legs hurt, my legs hurt," the little boy, Ali Abdullah Amin, told the Independent.

Amin and his father "were shot outside a small nearby mosque, a spot now marked by a large congealed pool of blood," Phil Reeves reported for the Independent. "Father didn't make it."

Matthew Rothschild - The Progressive