by Robert Fisk
It took just 600 American soldiers to capture the man who was for twelve years one of the West’s best friends in the Middle East and for twelve more years the West’s greatest enemy in the Middle East. In a miserable 8-foot hole in the mud of a Tigris farm near the village of Al-Dawr, the president of the Iraqi Arab Republic, leader of the Arab Socialist Baath party, ex-guerrilla fighter, invader of two nations, a former friend of Jacques Chirac and a man once courted by President Reagan, was found. And it was difficult, looking at those pictures of the Lion of Iraq—for so he called himself—to remember how royally he had been toasted in the past. This was the man who was the honoured guest of the city of Paris when Chirac was mayor and when the French could see the Jacobins in his bloody regime. This was the man who negotiated with UN Secretary Generals Perez de Cuellar and Kofi Annan, who chatted over coffee to none other than the man who was to become U.S. secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld, who met Ted Heath and Tony Benn and a host of European statesmen.
And there was a kind of satisfaction, driving up to al-Dawr on the Tigris River in northern Iraq, to arrive at the orange orchard where he was discovered and climb into his very hole in the ground. I lay down inside it. Seven months earlier, I had sat on his red velvet presidential throne in the greatest of all his marble palaces. Now here I was, lowering myself into the damp, dark and grey concrete interior of his final retreat, the midget bunker buried beside the Tigris—all of 8 feet by 5— and as near to an underground prison as any of his victims might imagine. Instead of chandeliers, there was just a cheap plastic fan attached to an air vent. Ozymandias came to mind. This, after all, was where his hopes finally crumbled to dust. And it was cold.
I FOUND SADDAM’S LAST BOOKS in a hut nearby: the philosophical works of Ibn Khaldun, the religious—and pro-Shiite—doctrines of the Abbasid theorist Imam al-Shafei and a heap of volumes of Arab poetry. There were cassettes of Arabic songs and some tatty pictures, of sheep at sunset and Noah’s Ark crowded with animals. But this was no resistance headquarters, no place from which to run a war or start an insurgency, no Führer-bunker with SS guards and switchboards and secretaries taking down last words for posterity.
To climb inside this most famous of all bolt-holes, I had to sit on the wooden entrance ledge and swing my legs into a narrow aperture and find my footing on four stairs made of earth. You used your arms to lower yourself into this last remnant of Iraqi Baathist history. Then you were sitting on the floor. There was no light, no water, only the concrete walls, the vent and a ceiling of wooden boards. Above the boards was earth and then a thick concrete floor which—up above— was covered by the equally thick concrete yard of a dilapidated farm hut. Yet above this sullen underground cell was a kind of paradise, of thick palm fronds and orange trees dripping gold with mandarins, of thickets of tall reeds, the sound of birds buried in the treetops. There was even an old blue-painted boat tucked away behind a wall of fronds, the last chance of escape across the silver Tigris if the Americans closed in.
Of course, they closed in from two directions, both from the river and down the muddy laneway along which soldiers of the American 4th Infantry Division led me. Saddam must have rushed from the hut where he ate his food—spilling a plate of beans and Turkish Delight onto the mud floor, I noticed—and squirrelled his portly self down the hole. When the Americans searched the hut, they found nothing suspicious—except a pot plant oddly positioned on top of some dried palm fronds, placed there presumably by two men who were later seized while trying to escape. Underneath, they found the entrance to the hole.
The soldiers mooching around the “site”—their word, as if it was a Sumerian city rather than a fraudulent, muddy Baathist playpen—were indifferent to the point of tiredness. They asked me to translate the Arabic inscription over Saddam’s bedroom—it began with the Koranic words “In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful . . .”—and they lent me their torches to prowl round the Saddam kitchen.
So what could we learn of Saddam in this, his very last private residence in Iraq? Well, he had chosen to hide only 200 metres from a shrine marking his own famous retreat across the Tigris River in 1959, on the run as a wounded young guerrilla after trying to assassinate an earlier president of Iraq. Here it was that he dug the bullet out of his body, and on a low hill within eyesight of this palm-grove is the mosque that marks the spot where, in a coffee shop, Saddam vainly pleaded with his fellow Iraqi tribesmen to help him escape. Saddam, in his last days as a free man, had retreated into his past, back to the days of glory that preceded his butcheries.
He had the use of a tiny generator, which I found wired up to a miniature fridge. There were two old beds and some filthy blankets. In the little kitchen constructed next door, there were sausages hanging to dry, bananas, oranges and— near a washing-up bowl—tins of Jordanian chicken and beef luncheon meat, heaps of “Happy Tuna.” Only the Mars Bars looked fresh.
So what did Saddam discover here in the last days? Peace of mind after the years of madness and barbarity? A place to reflect on his awesome sins, how he took his country from prosperity through foreign invasion and isolation and years of torture and suppression into a world of humiliation and occupation? The birds must have sung in the evening, the palm fronds above him must have clustered against each other in the night. But then there must have been the fear, the constant knowledge that betrayal was only an orchard away. It must have been cold in that hole. And no colder than when the hands of Washington-the-all-Powerful reached out across oceans and continents and came to rest on that odd-looking pot plant and hauled the would-be caliph from his tiny cell.
But there was one other conclusion upon which every Iraqi I spoke to agreed. This bedraggled, pathetic man with his matted, dirty hair, living in a hole in the ground with three guns and cash as his cave-companions—this man was not leading the Iraqi insurgency against the Americans. If more and more Iraqis were saying before Saddam’s capture, like the man in Ramadi, that the one reason they would not join the resistance to U.S. occupation was the fear that—if the Americans withdrew—Saddam would return to power, well, that fear had now been removed. So the nightmare was over—and the nightmare was about to begin. Both for the Iraqis and for us.
I remember an American search operation in Baghdad just after Saddam’s capture, all door-kicking and screaming and fuck-this and fuck-that and, just a few metres away, finding a message newly spray-painted on a wall. Not by hand but with a stencil, in poor English perhaps, but there were dozens of identical messages stencilled onto the walls for the occupiers. “American Soldiers,” it said. “Run away to your home before you will be a body in [sic] black bag, then be dropped in a river or valley.”
While Washington and London were still congratulating themselves on the capture of Saddam Hussein, U.S. troops shot dead at least eighteen Iraqis in the streets of three major cities in the country. Dramatic videotape from the city of Ramadi 75 miles west of Baghdad showed unarmed supporters of Saddam Hussein being shot down in semi-darkness as they fled from American troops. Eleven of the eighteen dead were killed by the Americans in Samara to the north of Baghdad. All the killings occurred during demonstrations by Sunni Muslims against the American seizure of Saddam, protests that started near Samara. The first demonstrators blocked roads north of Baghdad when armed men appeared alongside civilians who believed—initially—that U.S. forces had arrested one of Saddam’s doubles rather than the ex-dictator of Iraq. But their jubilation turned to fury when the Americans opened fire in Samara a few hours later. As usual, the American military claimed that all eighteen dead were “insurgents” and that U.S. forces had come under fire in all three cities. But this is what they also claimed in Samara just two weeks earlier when they boasted they had shot fifty-four “terrorists.” Journalists investigating the killings concluded then that while U.S. forces in the city had been ambushed while taking new currency notes to two banks, the only victims of American gunfire that could be confirmed were nine civilians, one of them a child, ano
ther an Iranian pilgrim.
A disturbing new phenomenon in this environment of growing military violence was the appearance of hooded and masked Iraqi gunmen—working for the Americans—on road checkpoints north of Baghdad. Five of them now checked cars on the Tigris River bridge outside Samara, apparently fearing that their identities would be discovered if their faces were not concealed. They wore militia uniforms and—although they said they were part of the new American-backed “Iraqi Civil Defence Corps” (ICDC)—they had neither badges of rank nor unit markings. The same hooded men were now appearing on the streets of Baghdad. Just before the Samara killings, several policemen stopped my car outside the city to warn that the Americans were “involved in a big battle with the holy warriors”—ominously for U.S. forces, they used the word “mujahedin”—and soon we were to discover that some—perhaps many—of these men were also insurgents, cops by day, killers by night; which was exactly what happened in Algeria. Families of the dead adopted the tradition of all tribal groups, just as they did at Fallujah: the dead must be avenged. And so their retaliation also turned inexorably into a resistance war that now embraced the entire Sunni Muslim area of Iraq.
JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS 2003. The thump of air pressure on my Baghdad window wakes me up, a blast of sound that gently shakes the walls; the sound of seventeen lives disappearing. The aftermath of bombs in Baghdad is a kind of obscene theatre. I reach the crossroads minutes later. There’s a shattered minibus with the pulverised remains of its passengers inside, a screaming fireman, pieces of a lorry—blown apart with such impact that the engine block is shorn in half—and two burning cars, the flames licking at their wheels and something terrible below the driver’s seat. The bomb was in the truck. But the bus, why would anyone bomb a busload of Iraqi civilians? There is flesh on the road, and vast shards of iron and metal and sandals and women’s handbags around the bus where several of the dead passengers—or what is left of them—are still sitting pitifully in their seats. Shrapnel has cascaded into the slums of Al-Bayaa, a pathetic warren of brick houses and sewage-filled laneways whose broken windows now sparkle in the streets.
A group of U.S. soldiers has just arrived, three of them prowling through the muck and the oil-splattered road for the detonator. Sergeant Joel Henshon of the 11th/65th U.S. military police guards what might have been part of the mechanism, a grenade that glistens grey and sinister on the mud of a traffic island. There must be 1,000 shouting people standing in the dawn of smoke and flames, men, kuffiahed in Arab scarves, many of them in black leather jackets. I find some cops by the burning cars, friendly, American-paid policemen with smart little yellow identification badges and pale blue uniforms. A brand-new fire brigade truck arrives and a torrent of water swamps what’s left of the truck and the bus. “New Iraq” responds efficiently to its growing violence. A policeman—for this is the flip side of every constabulary in the world—walks up and, incredibly, asks me if I’d like to know what he’s discovered.
“The truck belonged to the Ministry of Oil, it was a tanker without a trailer, registration number 5002, and we found this in what was left of the cab.” He gives me a golden sticker with “Allah” written in Arabic on one side and “Mohamed” on the other. God and his Prophet withstood the blast. Nothing else did. A dozen men have clustered ghoulishly around the nearest car and there is a mass of glistening bones beneath the blackened steering shaft, femurs and bits of a backbone. The Mercedes minibus had come from the province of Dyala, east of Baghdad, ten men and women and a driver who must have woken before dawn for a routine journey to the capital. But surely the bomber was en route to another target. Premature explosion. Was there a police station near here? Sergeant Henshon gives a Baghdad reply. “There was,” he says with a beautiful Alabama twang in this grim dawn. “But it’s already been bombed.” Then a shopkeeper says he saw an American convoy driving down the road and the truck trying to catch up with it and colliding with one of the cars beside the minibus. Was this the target? A few hours later, the occupation powers announce that the bombing was a traffic accident, a petrol tanker that exploded when it collided with a bus. It is a lie. What about the grenade in the road? The chopped-up engine block? The missing trailer? But we must now live on lies. Anything to keep another suicide bombing out of the papers.
Believe we are winning. Believe that we always kill insurgents. I am in Samara again, December 2003, and schoolboy Issam Naim Hamid is the latest of America’s famous “insurgents.” He was shot in the back as he tried to protect himself and his parents in his home in the Al-Jeheriya district of the ancient Abbasid city. It was three in the morning, according to his mother, Manal, when soldiers of the 4th Infantry Division came to the house, firing bullets through the gate. One of the rounds pierced the door, punched through a window and entered his back, speeding on through an outer wall. His father was hit in the ankle and was taken to Tikrit hospital in serious condition. Issam cries in pain in the emergency hospital ward, a drip-tube sticking into his stomach through a wad of bloody bandages.
Then there is the case of thirty-one-year-old farmer Maouloud Hussein, who was trying to push his five young daughters and son into the back room of his two-room slum home a few hours earlier when yet another bullet came whizzing through the gate and the outer wall of the house, and smashed into Maouloud’s back. His son, Mustafa, bleary-eyed with tears beside his father’s bed, and his four daughters, Bushra, Hoda, Issra and Hassa, were untouched. But the bullet tore into Maouloud’s body and exited through his chest. Doctors had just removed his spleen. His forty-one-year-old brother, Hamed, winces as he sees Maouloud cringing in agony—the wounded man tries to wave a hand at me but lapses into unconsciousness—and says that twenty-three bullets hit the house in their Al-Muthanna quarter of the city. Like Issam Hamid, he lay bleeding for several hours before help came. Issam’s mother, Manal, tells a terrible story. “The Americans had an Iraqi interpreter and he told us to stay in our home,” she says. “But we had no telephone, we couldn’t call an ambulance and both my husband and son were bleeding. The interpreter for the Americans just told us we were not allowed to leave the house.”
Hamed Hussein stands by his brother’s bed in a state of suppressed fury. “You said you would bring us freedom and democracy but what are we supposed to think?” he asks. “My neighbour, the Americans took him in front of his wife and two children and tied his hands behind his back and then, a few hours later, after all this humiliation, they came and said his wife should take all her most expensive things and they put explosives in their house and blew it up. He is a farmer. He is innocent. What have we done to deserve this?”
What will people do when you treat them like this? I ask myself. If we can shoot down the innocent like this, how soon before we torture them as well? Soon, soon. Now the city of Samara has become, like Fallujah, a centre of resistance to the American 4th Infantry Division. “We wanted the Americans to help us,” another man said to me in a street of American-vandalised homes. “This was Saddam’s Sunni area, but many of us disliked Saddam. But the Americans are doing this to humiliate us, to take their revenge on the attacks against them by the resistance.” Three times, I am taken into broken houses where young men tell me that they intend to join the muqawama—the resistance—after the humiliation and shame visited upon their homes. “We are a tribal people and I am from the al-Said family,” one says to me. “I have a university degree and I am a peaceful man, so why are the Americans attacking my home and filling my wife and children with fear?”
I go back and forth through my notes. It was in May 2003, only a month after the Americans entered Baghdad, that I first asked in The Independent : Isn’t it time we called this a resistance war? I predicted the insurgency when U.S. forces first entered Baghdad; but the speed with which the Americans found themselves fighting off a growing army of fighters was astonishing. In five, six months, a guerrilla war might have started. But one month? Two Americans shot dead and another nine wounded by unidentified gunmen in Fallujah, t
wo U.S. military policemen badly wounded by a rocket-propelled grenade at a north Baghdad police station, a grenade thrown at American soldiers near Abu Ghraib. That was the little toll of violence for just one day after the “liberation,” 27 May 2003—not counting the Muslim woman who approached U.S. troops with a hand grenade in each hand, was shot down before she could throw one of them and then, as she tried to hurl her second grenade from the ground, was finally killed by the Americans.
Even then, most people in Baghdad were receiving only two hours’ electricity a day. The petrol queues—in a country whose oilfields had already been corralled by the U.S. military, along with the lucrative clean-up and reconstruction contracts for American companies—stretch for up to 2 miles. Children are being withdrawn from newly opened schools after widespread child kidnapping and rape. The police stations now guarded by U.S. troops have been turned into blockhouses, surrounded by armour and guards with heavy machine guns, in lookout posts draped in camouflage netting and surrounded by concrete walls. Baghdad is becoming a city of walls, 20 feet high, running for miles along highways and shopping streets. We Westerners are on the run. Caged inside the marble halls of Saddam’s finest palace, thousands of American officers and civil servants—utterly cut off from the 5 million Iraqis in Baghdad around them—are now battling over their laptops to create the neo-conservative “democracy” dreamed up by Messrs. Rumsfeld, Perle and the rest. When they venture outside, they do so in flak jackets, perched inside armoured vehicles with escorts of heavily-armed troops.
