Robert Fisk in Baghdad

[Jim Farmelant <farmelantj@xxxxxxxx>]

Where were the panicking crowds? Where were the
food queues? Where were the empty streets?
Robert Fisk in Baghdad

05 April 2003

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=394169


A kind of fraudulent, nonchalant mood clogged Baghdad
yesterday. There appeared to be no attempt to block the
main highway into the city. Save for a few soldiers on the
streets and a squad car of police, you might have thought
this a holiday. All day yesterday, I asked myself the same
question: where was the supposed American assault on Baghdad?
Where were the panicking crowds? Where were the food queues?
Where were the empty streets?

And what exactly were the Americans doing? They were surrounding
the city, every foreign radio and television service insisted,
but travellers still arrived from Amman. The city authorities
have put more of their Chinese double-decker buses back on
the streets ? normal service, as they say, has been
resumed ? and the railway company claimed its trains were
still leaving for northern Iraq.

Then, just before midday yesterday, a low buzzing sound
insinuated its way into the consciousness of all those on
the streets of central Baghdad, a long, monotonous, slightly
wavering sound, a cross between a distant lawnmower and a
purring cat. And when I followed the pointed arms of a dozen
shoppers and policemen in Jumhurriyah Street, I at last caught
sight of the fly-like machine slowly moving up the grey, hot
skies over the city.

The Americans had sent their first drone over Baghdad, the
very first pilotless reconnaissance aircraft anyone here had
seen in this war, flying so slowly that, unlike the supersonic
jets that eagle their way down on the city to drop bombs,
it was easy to follow.

It buzzed westwards towards the largest and most bombed of the
presidential palaces and then wobbled southwards. It seemed
so fragile a creature, so tiny a presence in the black, angry
sky, that it was possible to forget the all-seeing eye in its
belly, the pictures it was showing to the Americans outside
the city perimeter, the choices it was helping to make about
which suburbs were to be bombed.

At the Yarmouk Hospital yesterday, the soldier was in agony,
his comrade in Saddam Hussein's Fedayeen militia weeping in
sympathy as his friend writhed in pain. The American bullets
had hit him in the legs and a woman doctor was slowly, with
infinite care, trying to ease his right boot from his foot.
He refused to cry out, refused to show his own suffering
although his eyes were clenched tight shut as the woman worked
at the boot, pulling the laces apart, fearing to cut the
trouser leg for what she would find underneath.

"We are the Fedayeen, we are proud men," his friend said,
brow drenched in sweat, shaking from the battle outside Saddam
international airport. "We were confronting the Americans and
we were holding them off. The Americans were scattering. Then
an officer told my comrade to go and get food and rations for
the men. It was when he got back that the bullets came and wounded him."

In one corridor at the Yarmouk, a middle-aged, white-haired
soldier wearing a colonel's uniform hobbled past me on a
crutch. But he stood erect in the hallway, brushing the
dust from his shoulders with their gold braid and epaulettes.

So where are the Americans? Only 18 hours earlier, I had prowled
the empty departure lounges of Saddam airport, mooched through
the abandoned customs department, chatted to the seven armed
militia guards, met the airport director and stood by the
runways where two dust-covered Iraqi Airways passenger jets ? an
old 727 and an even more elderly Antonov ? stood forlornly on
the Tarmac not far from an equally decrepit military helicopter.
And all I could hear was the distant whisper of high-flying
jets and the chatter of the flocks of birds that have nested
near the airport car park on this, the first day of real
summer in Baghdad.

There was new evidence yesterday of the use of cluster bombs,
on Baghdad itself this time, not just in the villages outside.
>From Furad, in the Doura district and Hay al-Ama and other
areas west of Baghdad, civilians were arriving in emergency
wards with the usual terrible wounds ? multiple and severely
deep gashes made by shrapnel released by bombs that explode in the air.

The death toll at Furud alone was said to be more than 80. One
central hospital received 39 wounded, four of whom died in
surgery. One young man had run for his life when he saw white
canisters dropping from the sky but he was hit as he tried to
run through his own front door. Another was a motorist who
saw the clusters of tiny bomblets, each packed with star-shaped
steel shrapnel, falling "like small stones" from the sky.
His feet were bathed in blood and the familiar tiny, jagged
holes of metal fragments could be found in his chest and arms.

There was a change in the clientele at the city's restaurants.
On Thursday, I had dropped into the Furud Takeaway for my daily
fix of chicken shish-taouk, tomatoes and green beans. It was
packed with Shia families chomping through giant mezzes of
houmous and tabouleh and lamb and rice. The television was
showing an Iranian channel, a musical in the Persian
language ? Iranian TV has two Arabic channels whose signal can
be picked up without a satellite dish ? and many Baghdadis
trust its news service more than that of Kuwaiti or
Saudi television.

Yesterday the cafés were packed with soldiers from the
Republican Guard divisions defending Baghdad, men who could
drive only 15 minutes back from the front to eat between
battles, their anti- aircraft guns and military vehicles
parked outside.

So where were the thousands of Guards whom the Americans
could not find in the desert? They were here in Baghdad,
defending their capital. Why, I wondered, should the
Americans find that so surprising?

But still there was that remorseful, illusionary refusal
among ordinary folk to accept the profound military, and
thus political, changes being prepared for Baghdad. In
Mansour, shopkeepers put the stories of America's
approach ? evident from the rumble of shellfire at the city
limits ? down to "foreign lies"; this from a seller of
pistachio nuts who was not being monitored by any
government minder

Maybe, I thought, Baghdadis have known so much war over
the past 23 years that the great armies and air forces that
have bombarded this country simply no longer register the
feelings of "shock and awe" that America expects.

Few here believe the Americans cannot bash their way into
Baghdad if they really want to. But what was meant by that
weird statement from the Americans that their special forces
would enter parts of Baghdad to discover whether US soldiers
would be welcomed or not? Would the Americans move faster
if they received a friendly response? It sounded here as
if an opinion poll was to decide the fate of Baghdad.

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