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It
Seemed as if Baghdad Would Fall Within Hours. But the Day Was Characterised by Crazed
Normality, High Farce and Death
by
Robert Fisk
in
Baghdad
Dissident Voice
April
8, 2003
It
started with a series of massive vibrations, a great "stomping" sound
that shook my room. "Stomp, stomp, stomp," it went. I lay in bed
trying to fathom the cause. It was like the moment in Jurassic Park when the
tourists first hear footfalls of the dinosaur, an ever increasing, ever more
frightening thunder of a regular, monstrous heartbeat.
From
my window on the east bank of the Tigris, I saw an Iraqi anti-aircraft gun
firing from the roof of a building half a mile away, shooting across the river
at something. "Stomp, stomp," it went again, the sound so enormous it
set off alarms in cars along the bank.
And
it was only when I stood on the road at dawn that I knew what had happened. Not
since the war in 1991 had I heard the sound of American artillery. And there,
only a few hundred metres away on the far bank of the Tigris, I saw them. At
first they looked like tiny, armoured centipedes, stopping and starting,
dappled brown and grey, weird little creatures that had come to inspect an
alien land and search for water.
You
had to keep your eye on the centipedes to interpret reality, to realise each
creature was a Bradley fighting vehicle, its tail was a cluster of US Marines
hiding behind the armour, moving forward together each time their protection
revved its engines and manoeuvred closer to the Tigris. There was a burst of
gunfire from the Americans and a smart clatter of rocket-propelled grenades and
puffs of white smoke from the Iraqi soldiers and militiamen dug into their
foxholes and trenches on the same river bank further south. It was that quick
and that simple and that awesome.
Indeed,
the sight was so extraordinary, so unexpected despite all the Pentagon boasts
and Bush promises that one somehow forgot the precedents that it was setting
for the future history of the Middle East.
Amid
the crack of gunfire and the tracer streaking across the river, and the huge
oil fires that the Iraqis lit to give them cover to retreat, one had to look
away to the great river bridges further north, into the pale green waters of
that most ancient of rivers to realise that a Western army on a moral crusade
had broken through to the heart of an Arab city for the first time since
General Allenby marched into Jerusalem in 1918. But Allenby walked into
Jerusalem on foot, in reverence for Christ's birthplace and yesterday's
American thrust into Baghdad had neither humility nor honour about it.
The
US Marines and special forces who spread out along the west bank of the river
broke into Saddam Hussein's largest palace, filmed its lavatories and bathrooms
and lay resting on its lawns before moving down towards the Rashid Hotel and
sniping at soldiers and civilians. Hundreds of Iraqi men, women and children
were brought to Baghdad's hospitals in the hours that followed victims of
bullets, shrapnel and cluster bombs. We could actually see the twin-engined
American A-10s firing their depleted uranium rounds into the far shore of the
river.
From
the eastern bank, I watched the marines run towards a ditch with their rifles
to their shoulders and search for Iraqi troops. But their enemies went on
firing from the mudflats to the south until, one after another, I saw them
running for their lives. The Iraqis clambered out of foxholes amid the American
shellfire and began an Olympic sprint of terror along the waterside; most kept
their weapons, some fell back to an exhausted walk, others splashed right into
the waters of the Tigris, up to their knees, even their necks. Three climbed
from a trench with hands in the air, in front of a group of marines. But others
fought on. The "stomp, stomp, stomp" went on for more than an hour.
Then the A-10s came back, and an F/A-18 sent a ripple of fire along the
trenches after which the shooting died away. It seemed as if Baghdad would fall
within hours.
But
the day was to be characterised with that most curious of war's attributes, a
crazed mixture of normality, death and high farce. For even as the Americans
were fighting their way up the river and the F/A-18s were returning to bombard
the bank, the Iraqi Minister of Information gave a press conference on the roof
of the Palestine Hotel, scarcely half a mile from the battle.
As
shells exploded to his left and the air was shredded by the power-diving
American jets, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf announced to perhaps 100 journalists
that the whole thing was a propaganda exercise, the Americans were no longer in
possession of Baghdad airport, that reporters must "check their facts and
re-check their facts that's all I ask you to do." Mercifully, the oil
fires, bomb explosions and cordite smoke now obscured the western bank of the
river, so fact-checking could no longer be accomplished by looking behind Mr
Sahaf's back.
What
the world wanted to know, of course, was the Question of All Questions where
was President Saddam? But Mr Sahaf used his time to condemn the Arabic
television channel al-Jazeera for its bias towards the US and to excoriate the
Americans for using "the lounges and halls" of Saddam Hussein to make
"cheap propaganda". The Americans "will be buried here," he
shouted above the battle. "Don't believe these invaders. They will be
defeated."
And
the more he spoke, the more one wanted to interrupt Mr Sahaf, to say: "But
hang on, Mr Minister, take a look over your right shoulder." But, of course,
that's not the way things happen. Why didn't we all take a drive around town,
he suggested defiantly.
So
I did. The corporation's double-decker buses were running and, if the shops
were shut, stallholders were open, men had gathered in tea houses to discuss
the war. I went off to buy fruit when a low-flying American jet crossed the
street and dropped its payload 1,000 metres away in an explosion that changed
the air pressure in our ears. But every street corner had its clutch of
militiamen and, when I reached the side of the Foreign Ministry, upstream from
the US Marines, an Iraqi artillery crew was firing a 120mm gun at the Americans
from the middle of a dual carriageway, its tongue of fire bright against the
grey-black fog drifting over Baghdad.
Within
an hour and a half, the Americans had moved up the southern waterfront and were
in danger of over-running the old ministry of information. Outside the Rashid
Hotel, the marines opened fire on civilians and militiamen, blasting a passing
motorcyclist onto the road and shooting at a Reuters photographer who managed
to escape with bullet holes in his car.
All
across Baghdad, hospitals were inundated with wounded, many of them women and
children hit by fragments of cluster bombs. By dusk, the Americans were flying
F/A-18s in close air support to the US Marines, so confident of their
destruction of Iraq's anti-aircraft gunners that they could clearly be seen
cruising the brown and grey skies in pairs.
Was
this what they call "rich in history"? General Stanley Maude invaded
Iraq in 1917 and occupied Baghdad. We repeated the performance in 1941 when the
former prime minister Rashid Ali decided to back Nazi Germany. The British,
Australians and Arabs "liberated" Damascus from the Turks in 1918.
The Israelis occupied Beirut in 1982 and lived not all of them to regret
it. Now the armies of America and, far behind them, the British a pale ghost
of Maude's army are moving steadily into this most north-eastern of Arab
capitals to dominate a land that borders Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Saudi
Arabia.
As
night fell, I came across three Iraqi defenders at the eastern end of the great
Rashid Bridge.These three two Baathist militiamen and a policeman were
ready to defend the eastern shore from the greatest army known to man.
That
in itself, I thought, said something about both the courage and the
hopelessness of the Arabs.
Robert Fisk is an award winning foreign
correspondent for The Independent
(UK), where this article first appeared. He is the author of Pity Thy
Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon (The Nation Books, 2002 edition). Posted
with authors permission.