by Robert Fisk
Well, yes, we said to ourselves, could one attack a more appropriate regime? But that was not the point. For the message of this new raid was the same as that of the previous night’s raid, and of all the raids in the hours to come: the United States must be obeyed; the EU, UN, NATO—nothing must stand in its way. Many Iraqis were already asking me: How many days? Not because they wanted the Americans or the British in Baghdad, but because they wanted this violence to end: which, when you think of it, is exactly why these raids took place.
It is the morning of 25 March 2003. Let us now praise famous men. Saddam Hussein is doing just that. Today he proceeds to list the Iraqi army and navy officers who are leading the “resistance” against the Anglo–American army in Um Qasr, Basra and Nasiriyah. Major-General Mustafa Mahmoud Umran, commanding officer of the 11th Division, Brigadier Bashir Ahmed Othman, commander of the Iraqi 45th Brigade, Brigadier-Colonel Ali Khalil Ibrahim, commander of the 11th Battalion of the 45th Brigade, Colonel Mohamed Khallaf al-Jabawi, commander of the 45th Brigade’s 2nd Battalion, Lieutenant-Colonel Fathi Rani Majid of the Iraqi army’s III Corps . . . And so it goes on. “Be patient,” Saddam keeps saying. Be patient. Fourteen times in all, he tells the army and the people of Iraq to be patient. “We will win . . . we will be victorious against Evil.” Patient but confident in victory. Fighting Evil.
Wasn’t that how President Bush was encouraging his people a few hours earlier? At other times, Saddam sounds like his hero, Josef Stalin. “They have come to destroy our country and we must stand and destroy them and defend our people and our country . . . Cut their throats . . . They are coming to take our land. But when they try to enter our cities, they try to avoid a battle with our forces and to stay outside the range of our weapons.” Was this modelled on the Great Patriotic War, the defence of Mother Russia under Uncle Joe? And if not, how to account for those hundreds of Iraqi soldiers still holding out under American air and tank attacks? People, party, patriotism. The three Ps run like a theme through the Saddam speech, along with a bitter warning: as the American and British forces make less headway on the ground, Saddam says, they will use their air power against Iraq ever more brutally. So what does it feel like to live these days in President Saddam’s future Stalingrad?
A few hours later, the cruise missiles and the planes came back. The great explosions blanketed Baghdad in the darkness. One of the Tomahawks smashed into the grounds of the Mustansariya University—twenty-five students wounded and one dead, so they claimed. There were other sounds in the early hours. A blaze of automatic gunfire on the Tigris corniche—attempts to capture two escaping U.S. airmen, the authorities insisted—and then a full-scale gun battle not far from the city centre at 2:30 a.m. There were rumours. Armed men had come from Saddam City, the Shia slums on the edge of Baghdad, and had been intercepted by state security men. No “independent confirmation.” A story that the railway line north of Baghdad has been cut. Denied.
On Sunday, the Iraqi minister of defence, General Sultan Hashem, gave a remarkable briefing on the war, naming the units involved in front-line fighting— the 3rd Battalion of the Iraqi army’s 27th Brigade was still holding out at Suq ash-Shuyukh south of Nasiriyah, the 3rd Battalion of the Third Iraqi Army was holding Basra. And I remembered how these generals gave identical briefings during the 1980–88 war against Iran. When we checked on their stories back then, they almost always turned out to be true. Did the same apply today? General Hashem insisted that his men were destroying U.S. tanks and armour and helicopters. This was easy to dismiss—until videotape of two burning U.S. armoured personnel carriers popped up on the television screen. Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan had been obliging enough to explain the Iraqi army’s tactics. It was Iraqi policy to let the Anglo–American armies “roam around” in the desert as long as they wanted, and to attack them when they tried to enter the cities. Which seemed to be pretty much what they were doing.
From Baghdad, with its canopy of sinister black oil smoke and air-raid sirens, the American plan appeared to be rather similar: to barnstorm up the desert parallel to the Tigris and Euphrates valley and try to turn right at every available city on the way. If there’s trouble at Um Qasr, try Basra. If Basra is blocked, have a go through Nasiriyah. If that’s dangerous, try to turn right through Najaf. But the open road—the long highway to Baghdad lined with adoring Iraqis throwing roses at GIs and Tommys—was proving to be an illusion.201 Yet we could not travel. No Western journalist—even with permission to take a street taxi—could leave the Baghdad city limits. On 27 March, I went to see my old friends at the Al-Jazeera channel whose local offices stood on the west bank of the Tigris. They had a crew in Basra which was under British ground and air attack. I begged them to show me the roughcuts of the videotape they had received from Basra. If I could not go there, I could at least look through the lens of their cameraman before the Iraqis— or, after transmission, the Americans and the British—got their hands on it.
I sit in their editing studio, the sound of anti-aircraft guns pummelling away outside the walls. The video-camera is hand-held, unsteady, the cameraman nervous. Two British soldiers lie dead on a Basra roadway, an Iraqi girl—victim of an Anglo–American air strike—is brought to hospital with her intestines spilling out of her stomach, a dreadfully wounded woman screams in agony as doctors try to take off her black dress. An Iraqi general, surrounded by hundreds of his armed troops, stands in central Basra and announces that Iraq’s second city remains firmly in Iraqi hands. The unedited Al-Jazeera tape—filmed over the past thirty-six hours and newly arrived in Baghdad—is raw, painful, devastating.
It is also proof that Basra—reportedly “captured” and “secured” by British troops—is still under the control of Saddam Hussein’s forces. Despite claims by British officers that some form of uprising has broken out there, cars and buses continue to move through the streets while Iraqis queue patiently for gas bottles as they are unloaded from a government truck. A remarkable part of the tape shows fireballs blooming over western Basra and the explosion of incoming—presumably British—shells.
The short sequence of the dead British soldiers—for the public showing of which Tony Blair was to express such horror a day later—was little different from dozens of similar clips of dead Iraqi soldiers shown on British television over the past twelve years, pictures that never drew any expressions of condemnation from the British prime minister. The two Britons, still in uniform, are lying on a roadway, arms and legs apart, one of them apparently hit in the head, the other shot in the chest and abdomen. Another sequence from the same tape shows crowds of Basra civilians and armed men in civilian clothes, kicking the soldiers’ British army jeep—registration number HP5AA—and dancing on top of the vehicle. Other men can be seen kicking the overturned Ministry of Defence trailer, registration number 91KC98, which the jeep was towing when it was presumably ambushed. Also to be observed on the unedited tape is an RAF pilotless drone photo-reconnaissance aircraft, its red-and-blue roundels visible on one wing, shot down and lying overturned on a roadway. Marked “ARMY” in capital letters, it carries the code sign ZJ300 on its tail and is attached to a large cylindrical pod that probably contains the plane’s camera.
Far more harrowing than the pictures of the dead British soldiers, however, is the tape from Basra’s largest hospital as victims of the bombardment are brought to the operating rooms, shrieking in pain. A middle-aged man is carried into the hospital in pyjamas, soaked head to foot in blood. A girl of perhaps four is brought into the operating room on a trolley, staring at a heap of her own intestines protruding from the left side of her stomach. A blue-uniformed doctor pours water over the little girl’s guts and then gently applies a bandage before beginning surgery. A woman in black with what appears to be a stomach wound cries out as doctors try to strip her for surgery. In another sequence, a trail of blood leads from the impact of an incoming—presumably British—shell. Next to the crater is a pair of plastic slippers.
The Al-Jazeera tapes�
��most of which will never be seen—are the first vivid proof that Basra remains totally outside British control. Not only is one of the city’s main roads to Baghdad still open—this is how the tapes reached the Iraqi capital—but Iraqi General Khaled Hatem is interviewed in a Basra street, surrounded by hundreds of his uniformed and armed troops, telling Al-Jazeera’s reporter that his men will “never” surrender to Iraq’s enemies. Armed Baath party militiamen can also be seen in the streets, where traffic cops are directing lorries and buses near the city’s Sheraton Hotel.
Mohamed al-Abdullah, Al-Jazeera’s correspondent in Basra, must be the bravest journalist in Iraq right now. In the sequence of three tapes, he can be seen interviewing families under fire and calmly reporting the incoming British artillery bombardments. One tape shows that the Sheraton Hotel on the banks of the Shatt al-Arab has sustained shell damage. On the edge of the river—beside one of the huge statues of Iraq’s 1980–88 war “martyrs,” each pointing an accusing finger across the waterway towards Iran—Basra residents can be seen filling jerrycans from the sewage-polluted river.
On 22 March the Iraqi government said that 30 civilians had been killed in Basra and another 63 wounded. On 27 March it claimed that more than 4,000 civilians had been wounded in Iraq since the war began and more than 350 killed. But Mr. al-Abdullah’s tape shows at least seven more bodies brought to the Basra hospital mortuary over the past thirty-six hours. (One of them, his head still gushing blood onto the mortuary floor, was identified as an Arab correspondent for a Western news agency.) Other grisly scenes show the partially decapitated body of a little girl, her red scarf still wound round her neck. Another girl lies on a stretcher with her brain and left ear missing. Another dead child has its feet blown away. There is no indication whether American or British ordnance killed these children. The tapes give no indication of Iraqi military casualties.
But at a time when the Iraqi authorities will not allow Western reporters to visit Basra, this is the nearest to independent evidence we have of continued fighting in the city and the cost of resisting the British army. For days, the Iraqis have been denying optimistic reports from “embedded” reporters—especially from the BBC—who give the impression that Basra is “secured” or otherwise effectively under British control. This the tapes conclusively prove to be untrue. There is also a sequence showing two men, both black, who are claimed by Iraqi troops to be U.S. prisoners-of-war. No questions are asked of the men, who are dressed in identical black shirts and jackets. Both appear on the tape nervous and looking at the camera crew and at the Iraqi troops who are crowded behind them.
The dead civilians, however, will soon be erased from the story of war. They are among the statistics that will be for ever kept from us. They will become unknown, the undead, the “collateral damage” that will simply not end up in the Pentagon or British Ministry of Defence archives—or at least, not in any file that the public will be allowed to see. Thus the little girl will not have lost her head. Her companion will not have lost her brain. The third child’s feet will remain firmly attached to her body. At least for the historical record—for there will be no historical record. That is part of our new war.
On 28 March we realised that the Americans—perhaps because they were not advancing as fast as they planned—did not want to keep Baghdad’s communications intact. It was difficult to weep over a telephone exchange. True, the destruction of the local phone system in Baghdad was a miserable experience for tens of thousands of Iraqi families who wanted to keep in contact with their relatives during the long dark hours of bombing. But the shattered exchanges and umbilical wires and broken concrete of the Mimoun International Communications Centre scarcely equalled the exposed bones and intestines and torn flesh of the civilian wounded of Iraq. “Command and control centres” is how the CENTCOM boys described the targets they zapped in the early hours of the 28th. It represents another of those little degradations that we—as in “we, the West”—routinely undertake when things aren’t going our way in a war. Back in “our” 1991 blitz on Baghdad, we started off on the presidential palaces and barracks, then moved on to communications, then electricity and then water treatment plants. In Serbia in 1999, it was the same story. First went the Yugoslav army barracks and arms factories, then the road bridges, phone system, the electricity. Now the same old story has begun in Baghdad. The presidential palaces and barracks have been hit. Time to smash the phones once again.
Obviously, “we” hoped it wouldn’t come to this. The Anglo–American armies wanted to maintain the infrastructure of Baghdad for themselves—after they had “liberated” the city under a hail of roses from its rejoicing people—because they would need working phone lines on their arrival. But after a night of massive explosions across the city, communications had been sacrificed. The huge Rashid telecommunications centre—destroyed in the 1991 bombardment—was struck by a cruise missile that penetrated the basement of the building. The exchange in Karada—where Baghdadis pay their phone bills—was ripped open.
Outside each of these blocks—as outside every government institution here— can be found a giant billboard of Saddam, doing whatever is appropriate to the relevant ministry or department. In front of Baghdad Central Station, for example, a Saddam in a felt hat is acting as signalman to speed an express on its way to Basra—services to the city, by the way, are now officially “suspended” because of the British military siege. At the Mimoun exchange, Saddam is standing in front of the telecommunications mast. At the Rashid offices, he is talking on an old-fashioned Bakelite black telephone while taking notes on a pad with a large brown biro.
No more. Because “we” have decided to destroy the phones and all those “command and control” systems that may be included, dual use, into the network. So now most Baghdadis have to drive across town to get news of each other; there is more traffic on the roads than at any time since the start of the war. Down, too, went Baghdad’s Internet system. Iraqi television, whose studios were bombed by the Americans on 26 March, can only be watched between a growing number of power cuts.
So what’s next? Electricity or water? Or, since power runs the water pumps, both? Each day brings news of events which—on their own—have no great import but which together add a grim new dimension to the invasion and its aftermath. At the end of March, hundreds of tribesmen from across Iraq met at the Baghdad Hotel before meeting Saddam. The Iraqi tribes—ignored by the military planners and Washington pundits who think that Iraq is held together only by the Baath party and the army—are a powerful force, their unity cemented by marriage and a network of families who provide a force as cohesive as the Baath party itself. Tribesmen guard the grain silos and some of the electricity generating stations around Baghdad. Two of them were credited with disabling an Apache helicopter captured a week earlier. And now tribal leaders arrived from all over Iraq, from Fallujah and Ramadi and Nineveh and Babylon and Basra and Nasiriyah and all the cities of Mesopotamia. So much for Defence Minister Geoffrey Hoon’s contention that Saddam has “lost control” of southern Iraq. They will return today and tomorrow to their cities and villages with instructions on how to oppose the American and British armies. Saddam has already issued one set of orders that tells the tribesmen “to fight [the Americans and British] in groups and attack their advance and rear lines to block the way of their progress . . . If the enemy settles into a position, start to harass them at night . . .”
I am puzzled about this. Guerrilla forces may harass an occupying army but will do little harm during an invasion when the overwhelming firepower and movement of the invaders can suppress any opposition. Only when the occupying soldiers settle into barracks and routine patrols do they become vulnerable. So is Saddam giving these tribesmen their marching orders for the war—or their instructions for the postwar occupation? Could it be that Saddam is confronting the possibility of military defeat in the field? Is there a future insurrection being planned here in Baghdad as the Americans storm up the road towards Nasiriyah?
On the tenth floor of the Palestine Hotel where I live amid the cell-like rooms of more than a hundred other journalists, I have squirrelled away a library of books to read in the long, loud nights. William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and J. F. C. Fuller’s The Second World War, to remind me of what real war is like, and Tolstoy’s War and Peace to recall for me how conflict can be described with sensitivity and grace and horror—I can heartily recommend the Battle of Borodino to anyone—and some volumes of poetry and a big, disorderly pile of newspaper and magazine articles which I tore from my Beirut archives before leaving for Amman and Baghdad. Tonight, I pull out a long rant by Pat Buchanan, written well over five months earlier, and almost without thinking, I pull my pen from my pocket and start scribbling harsh lines in the margin of this prophetic article:
If Providence does not intrude, we will soon launch an imperial war on Iraq with all the “On to Berlin!” bravado with which French poilus and British Tommies marched in August 1914. But this invasion will not be the cake-walk neoconservatives predict . . . To destroy Saddam’s weapons, to democratise, defend and hold Iraq together, U.S. troops will be tied down for decades. Yet, terrorist attacks in liberated Iraq seem as certain as in liberated Afghanistan. For a militant Islam that holds in thrall scores of millions of true believers will never accept George Bush dictating the destiny of the Islamic world. With our MacArthur Regency in Baghdad, Pax Americana will reach apogee. But then the tide recedes, for the one endeavour at which Islamic peoples excel is expelling imperial powers by terror and guerrilla war. They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of Algeria, the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon . . . We have started up the road to empire and over the next hill we will meet those who went before. The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.
