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Baghdad: The Day After
Arson,
Anarchy, Fear, Hatred, Hysteria, Looting, Revenge, Savagery, Suspicion and a Suicide
Bombing
by
Robert Fisk
in
Baghdad
Dissident Voice
April 11, 2003
It
was the day of the looter. They trashed the German embassy and hurled 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, women
in chadors 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 has been trying to save and improve the lives
of millions of Iraqi children since the 1980s, an army of thieves stormed the
building, throwing brand new photocopiers on top of each other and sending
cascades of UN files on child diseases, pregnancy death rates and nutrition
across the floors.
The
Americans may think they have "liberated" Baghdad but the tens of
thousands of thieves they came in families and cruised the city in trucks and
cars searching for booty seem to have a different idea what liberation means.
American
control of the city is, at best, tenuous a fact underlined after several
marines were killed last night by a suicide bomber close to the square where a
statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down on Wednesday, in the most staged
photo-opportunity since Iwo Jima.
Throughout
the day, American forces had fought gun battles with Saddam loyalists, said to
be fighters from other Arab countries. And, for more than four hours, marines
were in firefights at the Imam al-Adham mosque in the Aadhamiya district of
central Baghdad after rumours, later proved untrue, that Saddam Hussein and
senior members of his regime had taken flight there.
As
the occupying power, America is responsible for protecting embassies and UN
offices in their area of control but, yesterday, its troops were driving past
the German embassy even as looters carted desks and chairs out of the front
gate.
It
is a scandal, a kind of disease, a mass form of kleptomania that American
troops are blithely ignoring. At one intersection of the city, I saw US 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 blocked the highway
beneath.
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 have 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 minister of interior, of a former
defence minister, of Saadun Shakr, one of Saddam's closest security advisers,
of Ali Hussein Majid "Chemical" Ali who gassed the Kurds and was
killed last week in Basra and of Abed Moud, Saddam's private secretary. They
came with lorries, container trucks, buses and carts pulled by ill-fed donkeys
to make off with the contents of these massive villas.
It
also provided a glimpse of the shocking taste in furnishings that senior Baath
party members obviously aspired to; cheap pink sofas and richly embroidered
chairs, plastic drinks trolleys and priceless Iranian carpets so heavy it took
three muscular thieves to carry them. Outside the gutted home of one former
minister of interior, a fat man was parading in a stolen top hat, a Dickensian
figure who tried to direct the traffic jam of looters outside.
On
the Saddam bridge over the Tigris, a thief had driven his lorry of stolen goods
at such speed he had crashed into the central concrete reservation and still
lay dead at the wheel.
But
there seemed to be a kind of looter's law. Once a thief had placed his hand on
a chair or a chandelier or a door-frame, it belonged to him. I saw no
arguments, no fist-fights. The dozens of thieves in the German embassy worked
in silence, assisted by an army of small children. Wives pointed out the
furnishings they wanted, husbands carried them down the stairs while children
were used to unscrew door hinges and in the UN offices to remove light
fittings. One even stood on the ambassador's desk to take a light bulb from its
socket in the ceiling.
On
the other side of the Saddam bridge, an even more surreal sight could be
observed. A truck loaded down with chairs also had the two white hunting dogs
that belonged to Saddam's son Qusay tethered by two white ropes, galloping
along beside the vehicle. Across the city, I caught a glimpse of four of
Saddam's horses including the white stallion he had used in some presidential
portraits being loaded on to a trailer. Tariq Aziz's villa was also looted,
right down to the books in his library.
Every
government ministry in the city has now been denuded of its files, computers,
reference books, furnishings and cars. To all this, the Americans have turned a
blind eye, indeed stated specifically that they had no intention of preventing
the "liberation" of this property. One can hardly be moralistic about
the spoils of Saddam's henchmen but how is the government of America's
so-called "New Iraq" supposed to operate now that the state's
property has been so comprehensively looted? And what is one to make of the scene
on the Hillah road yesterday where I found the owner of a grain silo and
factory ordering his armed guards to fire on the looters who were trying to
steal his lorries. This desperate and armed attempt to preserve the very basis
of Baghdad's bread supply was being observed from just 100 metres away by eight
soldiers of the US 3rd Infantry Division, who were sitting on their tanks
doing nothing. The UN offices that were looted downtown are 200 metres from a
US Marine checkpoint.
And
already America's army of "liberation" is beginning to seem an army
of occupation. I watched hundreds of Iraqi civilians queuing to cross a
motorway bridge at Daura yesterday morning, each man ordered by US soldiers to
raise his shirt and lower his trousers in front of other civilians, including
women to prove they were not suicide bombers.
After
a gun battle in the Adamiya area during the morning, an American Marine sniper
sitting atop the palace gate wounded three civilians, including a little girl,
in a car that failed to halt then shot and killed a man who had walked on to
his balcony to discover the source of the firing. Within minutes, the sniper
also shot dead the driver of another car and wounded two more passengers in
that vehicle, including a young woman. A crew from Channel 4 Television was
present when the killings took place.
Meanwhile,
in the suburb of Daura, bodies of Iraqi civilians many of them killed by US
troops in battle earlier in the week lay rotting in their still-smouldering
cars. And yesterday was just Day Two of the "liberation" of Baghdad.
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.