The US convoy that carries cash to two banks here had been attacked before, but this time the troops were ready: Along with the money, they rumbled into this hard-line Baathist city on Sunday with tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and armored Humvees. They even put snipers on the roofs.
As if on cue, the guerrillas attacked, but according to US commanders, the Iraqis suffered a devastating defeat: A three-hour battle fought in the alleys and streets ended with what the military said were as many as 54 insurgents dead and only five Americans wounded.
On the streets of Samarra, it seemed, US commanders had finally gotten what they had long sought: a large number of Iraqi guerrillas drawn into the open, where US firepower could wipe them out.
"We didn't have the immediate intelligence that we knew it would happen, but we had to be prepared for it," Colonel Fred Rudesheim, who oversees the city, told reporters on Monday. "And our soldiers responded as they have been trained to, with the immediate action that they know to take."
But as local Iraqis on Monday began dragging away the wreckage and counting their dead, it seemed clear that the guerrilla war being fought in the areas north and west of Baghdad had entered a new and more troubling phase. Urban warfare in Iraq seemed likely to raise many more questions, including, in this case, the murkiest: What happened to all the corpses?
While US commanders said the Iraqi body count came from precise reports filed immediately after a close-range battle, hospital officials said Monday that they could account for, at most, eight dead, and that most of those were civilians. On Monday morning, only two bodies -- a gray-bearded old man and a middle-aged woman -- lay on the bloody steel trays of the hospital morgue.
More broadly, the battle that unfolded Sunday afternoon underscored a dilemma that military officials here have been weighing for months: How to ratchet up the pressure on the insurgents, who are killing a growing number of Americans and Iraqis, without alienating the very people the Americans are trying to win over.
As they showed here on Sunday, US soldiers can be fast on their feet and deliver a crushing amount of firepower. But the use of overwhelming military force, so effective against the guerrillas, seemed to push many Iraqis away.
"If I had a gun, I would have attacked the Americans myself," said Satar Nasiaf, 47, a shopkeeper who said he watched two Iraqi civilians fall to US fire. "The Americans were shooting in every direction."
Adnan Sahib Dafar, 52, an ambulance driver, walked with anger in and out of the morgue, pointing to the dead woman who lay on the bloody steel tray. The woman, Dafar said, had been an employee at the city's big pharmaceutical factory when she was caught in the crossfire.
"Is this woman shooting a rocket-propelled grenade?" demanded Dafar, who said he saw only eight dead Iraqis. "Is she fighting?"
Rudesheim, saying he had not seen any reports of civilian dead, argued that battles like this one will win the support of ordinary Iraqis.
"Attacks, in our view, are attacks against freedom-loving Iraqis that want to move on with life, versus those that are trying to drag them back to something akin to the former regime," he said. "What we hear is that the people of Samarra are fed up."
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