Robert Fisk, "The Battle of Baghdad"

[Jim Farmelant <farmelantj@xxxxxxxx>]

The Battle of Baghdad
'Ever so slowly, the suburbs were turned into battlefields'
By Robert Fisk
06 April 2003

http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=394486

The Iraqi bodies were piled high in the pick-up truck
in front of me, army boots hanging over the tailboard,
a soldier with a rifle sitting beside them. Beside the
highway, a squad of troops was stacking grenades as the
ground beneath us vibrated with the impact of US air strikes.
The area was called Qadisiya. It was Iraq's last front line.
Thus did the Battle for Baghdad enter its first hours,
a conflict that promises to be both dirty and cruel

Beside the highway, the Iraqi armoured vehicle was still
smouldering, a cloud of blue-grey smoke rising above the
plane trees under which its crew had been sheltering. Two t
rucks were burnt out on the other side of the road. The
American Apache helicopters had left just a few minutes
before I arrived. A squad of soldiers, flat on their
stomachs, were setting up an anti-armour weapon on the
weed-strewn pavement, aiming at the empty airport
motorway for the first American tanks to come
thrashing down the highway.

Then there were the Iraqi bodies, piled high in the
back of a pick-up truck in front of me, army boots
hanging over the tailboard, a soldier with an automatic
rifle sitting beside them. Beside the highway, a squad
of troops was stacking rocket-propelled grenades beside
a row of empty shops as the ground beneath us vibrated
with the impact of American air strikes and shellfire.
The area was called Qadisiya. It was Iraq's last front line.

Thus did the Battle for Baghdad enter its first hours
yesterday, a conflict that promises to be both dirty
and cruel. Even the city's police force was sent to
the front, its officers parading in a fleet of squad
cars through the central streets, waving their newly
issued Kalashnikov rifles from the windows.

What is one to say of such frantic, impersonal ? and,
yes, courageous ? chaos? A truck crammed with more than
a hundred Iraqi troops, many in blue uniforms, all of
them carrying rifles which gleamed in the morning sunlight,
sped past me towards the airport. A few made victory
signs in the direction of my car ? I confess to touching
145km an hour on the speedometer ? but of course one had
to ask what their hearts were telling them. "Up the line
to death" was the phrase that came to mind. Two miles away,
at the Yarmouk hospital, the surgeons stood in the car
park in blood-stained overalls; they had already handled
their first intake of military casualties.

A few hours later, an Iraqi minister was to tell the
world that the Republican Guard had just retaken the
airport from the Americans, that they were under fire
but had won "a great victory". Around Qadisiya, however,
it didn't look that way. Tank crews were gunning their
T-72s down the highway past the main Baghdad railway
yards in a convoy of armoured personnel carriers and
Jeeps and clouds of thick blue exhaust fumes. The more
modern T-82s, the last of the Soviet-made fleet of
battle tanks, sat hull down around Jordan Square
with a clutch of BMP armoured vehicles.

The Americans were coming. The Americans were claiming
to be in the inner suburbs of Baghdad ? which was untrue;
indeed, the story was designed, I'm sure, to provoke
panic and vulnerability among the Iraqis.

True or false, the stories failed. Across vast fields
of sand and dirt and palm groves, I saw batteries of
Sam-6 anti-aircraft missiles and multiple Katyusha
rocket launchers awaiting the American advance. The
soldiers around them looked relaxed, some smoking
cigarettes in the shade of the palm trees or sipping
fruit juice brought to them by the residents of Qadisiya
whose homes ? heaven help them ? were now in the firing line.

But then there was the white-painted Japanese pick-up
truck that pulled out in front of my car. At first,
I thought the soldiers on the back were sleeping,
covered in blankets to keep them warm. Yet I had
opened my car window to keep cool this early summer
morning and I realised that all the soldiers ? there
must have been 15 of them in the little truck ? were
lying on top of each other, all with their heavy
black military boots dangling over the tailboard.
The two soldiers on the vehicles sat with their feet
wedged between the corpses. So did America's first
victims of the day go to their eternal rest.

"Today, we attack," the Minister of Information,
Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, was to announced an hour
later, and he reeled off a list of Iraqi "victories"
to sustain his country's morale. Seven British and
American tanks destroyed around Basra, four American
personnel carriers and an American aircraft destroyed
near Baghdad. At the airport, the Iraqis "confronted
the enemy and slaughtered them". Or so we were told.

Well, an Iraqi friend of mine who lives near the
airport told me that he had seen a tank on fire, a
tank with a black "V" sign painted on its armour.
The "V" is the American symbol of "friendly force",
intended to warn their pilots from bombing their own
soldiers by mistake. So this must have been an American tank.

But Mr Sahaf's optimism got the better of him. Yes,
he told journalists in Baghdad, Doura was safe,
Qadisiya was safe. Yarmouk was safe. "Go and look
for yourselves," he challenged. Ministry of Information
officials were ashen-faced. And when foreign correspondents
were bussed off on this over-confident adventure, they
were turned back at the Yarmouk hospital and the ministry
buses firmly ordered to carry reporters back to their hotel.

But an earlier 35-minute journey around the shell-embraced
suburbs proved one thing yesterday: that the Iraqis ? up
till dusk at least ? were preparing to fight the
invaders. I found their 155mm artillery around the
centre of the city, close to the rail lines. One
artillery piece was even hauled up Abu Nawas Street
beside the Tigris by a truck whose soldiers held up
their rifles and shouted their support for Saddam Hussein.

And all day, the air raids continued. It gets confusing,
amid the dust and smoke, all these new targets and
new pockets of ruination. Was the grey-powdered
rubble in Karada a building yesterday, or was it
struck last week? The central telephone exchange had
taken another hit. So had the communications centre in
Yarmouk. And then I noticed, along the front line where
the Iraqi soldiers were preparing to become heroes or
"martyrs" or survivors ? the last an infinitely preferable
outcome to the sanest of soldiers ? how small craters
had been punched into the flowerbeds on the central reservations.

Ever so slowly, the suburbs of Baghdad were being
turned into battlefields.

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