Last night I cited audio reports by The Washington Post's Anthony Shadid in which he said that the Iraqi convoy attacked by U.S. forces last Wednesday was, according to local residents, a convoy of sheep smugglers. Here's the story Shadid wrote for today's Post.

...U.S. officials backed away from their initial assessments of whether the attack early Thursday near the village of Dhib killed top officials in the former Iraqi government, saying they had picked up no indications since the attack that Saddam Hussein or his sons, Uday and Qusay, had been in the convoy....

After the attack began, villagers said cries pierced the air. Some contended that cluster bombs were used. Other villagers insisted that was wrong, that it was heavy machine-gun fire. They said they were saved by fleeing their homes. "When they hit Ahmed's house, it was like an alarm," said a neighbor, Mohammed Naim, 29. "Everybody ran away from their homes."

By the time the barrage ended, four houses were destroyed, along with two storage shacks, residents said. Villagers sitting in the hospital listed their losses like an insurance claim: three pickups, three tractors, one truck and 13 heads of sheep.

"We're not guilty," Hamad said. "Why are they attacking families? We want to know the reason they're attacking families."...