Fisk on the Battle for Baghdad

["Jay Moore" <pieinsky@xxxxxxx>]

I certainly don't trust the U.S. and British propaganda about their
battlefield successes.  Too many obvious "psyop" lies.  The Russian
"intelligence" sources are interesting but I'm not sure how far they can
trusted either.  Robert Fisk, however, I do trust.  He's there and reports
what he sees.

jay
www.neravt.com/left/

**********

Baghdad Suburbs Turned Into Battlefields
Robert Fisk, The Independent (UK)

BAGHDAD, 6 April 2003 - Beside the highway, the Iraqi armored vehicle  was
still smoldering, a

cloud of blue-gray smoke rising above the plane trees under which its crew
had been sheltering. Two trucks were burned 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, was setting up an
anti-armor 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 airstrikes 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 toward the airport.

A few made victory signs in the direction of my car - I confess to touching
145 km 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 Guards 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 armored 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 armored 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 realized 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," Minister of Information Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf, was to
announce 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 armor. 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 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 overconfident 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 center 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
gray-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 center 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.