by Robert Fisk
On television, it looked so clean. On the previous Sunday evening the BBC showed burning civilian cars, its reporter—my old friend and colleague Gavin Hewitt, with whom I had travelled across Afghanistan almost a quarter of a century ago but now “embedded” with American forces—saying that he saw some of their passengers lying dead beside their vehicles. That was all. No pictures of the charred corpses, no close-ups of the shrivelled children. So perhaps there should be another warning here for those of a “nervous” disposition. Read no further unless you want to know what America and Britain did to the innocents of Baghdad.
I’ll leave out the description of the flies that have been clustering round the wounds in the Kindi emergency rooms, of the blood caked on the sheets and the dirty pillow cases, the streaks of blood on the floor, the blood still dripping from the wounds of those I talked to. All were civilians. All wanted to know why they had to suffer. All—save for the incandescent youth who ordered me to leave the little boy’s bed—talked gently and quietly about their pain. No Iraqi government bus took me to the Kindi Hospital. No doctor knew I was coming.
Let’s start with Ali Abdulrazek. He’s forty years old, the car salesman who was walking yesterday morning through a narrow street in the Shaab district of Baghdad—that’s where the two American missiles killed twenty-one civilians in Abu Taleb Street—when he heard the jet engines of an aircraft. “I was going to see my family because the phone exchanges have been bombed and I wanted to make sure they were OK,” he said. “There was a family, a husband and wife and kids, in front of me. Then I heard this terrible noise and there was a light and I knew something had happened to me. I went to try to help the family in front of me but they were all gone, in pieces. Then I realised I couldn’t see properly.”
Over Abdulrazek’s left eye is a wad of thick bandages, tied to his face. His doctor, Osama al-Rahimi, tells me “we did not operate on the eye, we have taken care of his other wounds.” Then he leans towards my ear and says softly: “He has lost his eye. There was nothing we could do. It was taken out of his head by the shrapnel.” Abdulrazek smiles—of course, he does not know that he will be for ever half-blind—and suddenly breaks into near-perfect English, a language he learned at high school in Baghdad. “Why did this happen to me?” he asks.
Mohamed Abdullah Alwani was a victim of America’s little excursion to the banks of the Tigris, the operation that provided such exciting television footage. He was travelling home on his motorcycle from the Rashid Hotel on the western side of the Tigris when he passed a road in which an American armoured vehicle was parked. “I only saw the Americans at the last moment. They opened fire and hit me and I managed to stay on the cycle. Then their second shell sent bits of shrapnel into the bike and I fell off.” Dr. al-Rahimi peels the bandage back from Alwani’s side. Next to his liver is a vicious, bloody, weeping gash, perhaps half an inch deep. Blood is still running down his legs and off his toes. “Why do they shoot civilians?” he asked me. Yes, I know the lines. Saddam would have killed more Iraqis than us if we hadn’t invaded—not a very smart argument in the Kindi Hospital—and we’re doing all this for Alwani and his friends. Didn’t Paul Wolfowitz tell us all a couple of weeks ago that he was praying for both the American troops and for the Iraqi people? Aren’t we coming here to save them—let’s not mention the oil—and isn’t Saddam a cruel and brutal man? But amid these people, you’d have to have a sick mind to utter such words.
Saadia Hussein al-Shomari is pin-cushioned with bloody holes. She is a civil servant from the Iraqi Ministry of Trade and she lies asleep, exhausted by pain, another doctor swiping the flies off her wounds with a piece of cardboard, asking me—as if I knew—whether a human can recover from a severe wound to the liver. A relative tells slowly how Saadia was leaving her home in the Baghdad Jdeidi district when an American plane dropped a cluster bomb on the estate. “There were some neighbours of hers. They were all hit. From one of them, a leg flew off, from another, an arm and a leg went flying into the air.”
Then there was Safa Karim, eleven years old and dying. An American bomb fragment struck her in the stomach and she is bleeding internally, writhing on the bed with a massive bandage on her stomach and a tube down her nose and—somehow most terrible of all—a series of four cheap and dirty scarves that tie each of her wrists and ankles to the bed. She moans and thrashes where she lies, fighting pain and imprisonment at the same time. A relative—her black-shrouded mother sits by the bed in silence—says that she is too ill to understand her fate. “She has been given ten bottles of drugs and she has vomited them all up,” he says. Through the mask that the drip tube makes of her face, Safa moves her eyes toward her mother, then the doctor, then the journalist, then back to her mother.
The man opens the palms of his hands, the way Arabs do when they want to express impotence. “What can we do?” they always say, but the man is silent, and I’m glad. How, after all, could I ever tell him that Safa Karim must die for September 11th, for George W. Bush and Tony Blair’s religious certainty, Paul Wolfowitz’s dreams of “liberation,” and for the “democracy” that we are blasting these people’s lives to create?
BUT THE DAY MUST DAWN. It is 9 April and the Americans have “liberated” Baghdad. They have destroyed the centre of Saddam Hussein’s quarter-century of brutal dictatorial power but brought behind them an army of looters who have unleashed upon the ancient city a reign of pillage and anarchy. It was a day that had begun with shellfire and blood-spattered hospitals and ended with the ritual destruction of the dictator’s statues. The mobs shrieked their delight. Men who, for twenty-five years, had grovelled to Saddam’s most humble secret policemen turned into giants, bellowing their hatred of the Iraqi leader as his vast and monstrous statues thundered to the ground.
“It is the beginning of our new freedom,” an Iraqi shopkeeper shouted at me. Then he paused, and asked: “What do the Americans want from us now?” The great Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran once wrote that he pitied the nation that welcomed its tyrants with trumpetings and dismissed them with hootings of derision. And now the people of Baghdad performed this same deadly ritual, forgetting that they—or their parents—had behaved in identical fashion when the Arab Socialist Baath party destroyed the previous dictatorship of Iraq’s generals and princes. Forgetting, too, that the “liberators” were a new and alien and all-powerful occupying force with neither culture nor language nor race nor religion in common with Iraq.
When tens of thousands of Shia Muslim poor from the vast slums of Saddam City poured into the centre of Baghdad to smash their way into shops, offices and government ministries—an epic version of the orgy of theft and mass destruction that the British did so little to prevent in Basra two weeks earlier—U.S. Marines watched from only a few hundred yards away as looters made off with cars, rugs, hoards of money, computers, desks, sofas, even door-frames.
In Fardus Square, U.S. Marines pulled down the gaunt and massive statue of Saddam by roping it to an armoured personnel carrier. It toppled menacingly forward from its plinth to hang lengthways above the ground, right arm still raised in fraternal greetings to the Iraqi people. It was a symbolic moment in more ways than one. I stood behind the first man to seize a hatchet and smash at the imposing grey marble plinth, but within seconds, the marble had fallen away to reveal a foundation of cheap bricks and badly cracked cement. That’s what the Americans always guessed Saddam’s regime was made of, although they did their best—in the late Seventies and early Eighties—to arm him and service his economy and offer him political support, to turn him into the very dictator he became.
In one sense, therefore, America—occupying the capital of an Arab nation for the first time in its history—was helping to destroy what it had spent so much time and money creating. Saddam had been “our” man and now we were annihilating him. Hence the importance of all those statue-bashing mobs, all that looting and theft. At Fardus Square I had seen a small group of young men arriving with a rope and pick-axes. They came as on
e, not spontaneously, and I have often wondered who organised their little melodrama. But they could not pull the statue down. As so often, the Arabs needed American help. So the marines obliged and it was left to the United States to tear down the dictator’s likeness. A hundred cameras whirred and whined and sucked in this fraudulent scene for posterity. The Iraqi people tear down the image of their oppressor. Only they didn’t. The Americans destroyed the statue of Saddam in front of those too impotent to do the job themselves.
The man’s rule, of course, was effectively over. The torture chambers and the prisons, I wrote in my paper that night, should now be turned into memorials, the true story of Iraq’s use of gas warfare revealed at last. “But history suggests otherwise. Prisons usually pass over to new management, torture cells too . . . And indeed they did.”
Not that the nightmare was over. For though the Americans would mark 9 April as their first day of occupation—they would call it “liberation”—vast areas of Baghdad still remained outside the control of the United States. Just before darkness curled over the land, I crossed through the American lines, back to the little bit of Saddam’s regime that remained intact within the vast, flat city of Baghdad. Down grey, carless streets, I drove to the great bridges over the Tigris that the Americans had still not crossed from the west. And there, on the corner of Bab al-Moazzam Street, was a small group of mujahedin fighters, firing Kalashnikov rifles at the American tanks on the other side of the waterway. It was brave and utterly pathetic and painfully instructive.
For the men turned out to be Arabs from Algeria, Morocco, Syria, Jordan, Palestine. Not an Iraqi was among them. The Baathist militiamen, the Republican Guard, the greasy Iraqi intelligence men, the so-called Saddam Fedayeen, had all left their posts and crept home. Only the foreign Arabs, like the Frenchmen of the Nazi Charlemagne Division in 1945 Berlin, fought on. At the end, many Iraqis had shunned these men; a group of them turned up to sit outside the lobby of the Palestine Hotel, pleading to journalists for help in returning home.
“We left our wives and children and came here to die for these people and then they told us to go,” one of them said. But at the end of the Bab al-Moazzam Bridge they fought on into the night, and when I left them I could hear the American jets flying in from the west. Hurtling back through those empty streets, I could hear, too, the American tank fire as it smashed into their building. If there was to be a resistance in the future, here were willing recruits for the insurgency—if they survived.
Tanks come in two forms: the dangerous, deadly kind that spit fire and the “liberating” kind from which smart young soldiers with tanned faces look down with smiles at Iraqis who are obliging enough to wave at them, tanks with cute names stencilled on their gun barrels, names like “Kitten Rescue” and “Nightmare Witness”—this with a human skull painted underneath—and “Pearl.” And there has to be a first soldier—of the occupying or liberating kind—who stands at the very front of the first column of every vast and powerful army. So I walked up to Corporal David Breeze of the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, from Michigan. He hadn’t spoken to his parents for two months, so I called his mother on my satellite phone and from the other side of the world, Mrs. Breeze came on the line and I handed the phone to her son. And this is what the very first American soldier to enter the centre of Baghdad told his family: “Hi you guys. I’m in Baghdad. I’m ringing to say ‘Hi! I love you. I’m doing fine. I love you guys.’ The war will be over in a few days. I’ll see you all soon.”
Yes, I wrote that evening:
They all say the war will be over soon. There would be a homecoming no doubt for Corporal Breeze and I suppose I admired his innocence despite the deadly realities that await America in this dangerous, cruel land. For even as the marine tanks thrashed and ground down the highway, there were men and women who saw them and stood, the women scarved, the men observing the soldiers with the most acute attention, who spoke of their fear for the future, who talked of how Iraq could never be ruled by foreigners.
“You’ll see the celebrations and we will be happy Saddam has gone,” one of them said to me. “But we will then want to rid ourselves of the Americans and we will want to keep our oil and there will be resistance and then they will call us ‘terrorists.’ ” Nor did the Americans look happy “liberators.” They pointed their rifles at the pavements and screamed at motorists to stop—one who did not, an old man in an old car, was shot in the head in front of two French journalists.
Of course, the Americans knew they would get a good press by “liberating” the foreign journalists at the Palestine Hotel. They lay in the long grass of the nearest square and pretended to aim their rifles at the rooftops as cameras hissed at them, and they flew a huge American flag from one of their tanks and grinned at the reporters, not one of whom reminded them that just 24 hours earlier, their army had killed two Western journalists with tank fire in that same hotel and then lied about it.
But it was the looters who marked the day as something sinister rather than joyful. In Saddam City, they had welcomed the Americans with “V” signs and cries of “Up America” and the usual trumpetings, but then they had set off downtown for a more important appointment. At the Ministry of Economy, they stole the entire records of Iraq’s exports and imports on computer discs, with desk-top computers, with armchairs and fridges and paintings. When I tried to enter the building, the looters swore at me. A French reporter had his money and camera seized by the mob.
At the Olympic sports offices, run by Uday Hussein, they did the same, one old man staggering from the building with a massive portrait of Saddam which he proceeded to attack with his fists, another tottering out of the building bearing a vast ornamental Chinese pot. True, these were regime targets. But many of the crowds went for shops, smashing their way into furniture stores and professional offices. They came with trucks and pick-ups and trailers pulled by scruffy, underfed donkeys to carry their loot away. I saw a boy making off with an X-ray machine, a woman with a dentist’s chair. At the Ministry of Oil, the minister’s black Mercedes limousine was discovered by the looters. Unable to find the keys, they tore the car apart, ripping off its doors, tyres and seats, leaving just the carcass and chassis in front of the huge front entrance. At the Palestine Hotel, they smashed Saddam’s portrait on the lobby floor and set light to the hoarding of the same wretched man over the front door. They cried Allahu akbar . . . And there was a message there, too, for the watching Marines if they had understood it.
And so last night, as the explosion of tank shells still crashed over the city, Baghdad lay at the feet of a new master. They have come and gone in the city’s history, Abbasids and Ummayads and Mongols and Turks and British and now the Americans. The United States embassy reopened yesterday and soon, no doubt, when the Iraqis have learned to whom they must now be obedient friends, President Bush will come here and there will be new “friends” of America to open a new relationship with the world, new economic fortunes for those who “liberated” them, and—equally no doubt—relations with Israel and a real Israeli embassy in Baghdad.
But winning a war is one thing. Succeeding in the ideological and economic project that lies behind this whole war is quite another. The “real” story for America’s mastery over the Arab World starts now.
If 9 April was the day of “liberation,” 10 April was the day of the looter. They trashed the German embassy and threw the ambassador’s desk into the yard. I rescued the European Union flag—flung into a puddle of water outside the visa section—as a mob of middle-aged men, chadored women and screaming children rifled through the consul’s office and hurled Mozart records and German history books from an upper window. The Slovakian embassy was broken into a few hours later. At the headquarters of UNICEF, which had been trying to save the lives of millions of Iraqi children since the 1980s, an army of thieves stormed the building, throwing brand-new photocopiers on top of one another down the stairs and sending cascades of UN files on child diseases, pregnancy death rates
and nutrition across the floors.
The Americans might have thought they had “liberated” Baghdad after the most stage-managed photo-opportunity since Iwo Jima, but the tens of thousands of thieves—they came in families and cruised the city in trucks and cars searching for booty—seemed to have a different idea of what “liberation” meant. It also represented a serious breach of the Geneva Conventions. As the occupying power, the United States was responsible for protecting embassies and UN offices in their area of control, but their troops drove past the German embassy even as looters carted desks and chairs out of the front gate. It was a scandal, a kind of disease, a mass form of kleptomania which American troops simply ignored. At one intersection of the city, I saw U.S. Marine snipers on the rooftops of high-rise building, scanning the streets for possible suicide bombers while a traffic jam of looters— two of them driving stolen double-decker buses crammed with refrigerators— crammed the highway beneath them. Outside the UN offices, a car slowed down beside me and one of the unshaven, sweating men inside told me in Arabic that it wasn’t worth visiting because “we’ve already taken everything.”
Understandably, the poor and the oppressed took their revenge on the homes of the men of Saddam’s regime who impoverished and destroyed their lives—sometimes quite literally—for more than two decades. I watched whole families search through the Tigris bank home of Ibrahim al-Hassan, Saddam’s half-brother and a former interior minister, of a former defence minister, of Saadoun Shakr, one of Saddam’s closest security advisers, of Ali Hassan al-Majid—“Chemical” Ali— and of Abed Hmoud, Saddam’s private secretary. They came with lorries, container trucks, buses and donkey-drawn carts to make off with the contents of these massive villas.
