BAGHDAD, 7 April 2003 — After days of watching US warplanes batter the city and seeing all his neighbors flee their New Baghdad neighborhood, Raymond Khalil decided he had had enough. So he piled his extended family into a rickety 12-seater bus, an ancient Peugeot and an orange-and-white taxi and took them downtown.
He’d like to have gone farther, he admitted, but the tires on his vehicles were too threadbare and the engines probably wouldn’t have lasted much beyond the city limits.
The 42-year-old electrician was doing what all of Baghdad seemed to be doing on this decision-time Saturday: Fight, or flight? With US bombing runs intensifying and the first foray of American troops into the city proper, people were increasingly choosing flight, streaming out of the city on foot or in whatever vehicles they could find.
But government loyalists were digging in for a fight. For the first time, black-suited members of the Fedayeen Saddam — those willing to sacrifice themselves for President Saddam Hussein — were spotted inside the city. At the same time, dun-colored Republican Guard tanks appeared on city streets, and artillery emplacements appeared near some intersections. The detritus of urban warfare may have further spooked residents. After a two-hour firefight in the Doura district of southern Baghdad, about a dozen burned and twisted Iraqi vehicles still littered the road near a highway overpass on the west side of the Tigris late Saturday.
While war steadily encroached on regular Iraqis’ lives here, there was no sign that the Americans had reached the center of town, as the US Central Command had boasted. But the Iraqis also fired a few shots in the continuing campaign waged by both sides, with Information Minister Mohammed Said Al-Sahaf asserting that Iraqi forces had recaptured the city’s international airport. The US military dismissed the claim as “groundless.’’
The exodus from Baghdad on Saturday reflected thousands of individual decisions. Khalil said he had initially intended for his family to stay in their houses in New Baghdad, a working-class suburb on the southeastern outskirts. But another night of terrible bombing Friday and the sight of most of his neighbors leaving convinced him to take his family, and those of his two sisters and their husbands, to a relative’s flat in the center of Baghdad.
For a 33-year-old goldsmith, Moustafa Kamel, the location of his residence in the Bayaa district was decisive. It is near the airport.
Kamel took his wife and children to the small town of Heet, in western Iraq, where there is not likely to be any heavy fighting.
“Baghdad is not safe now,’’ he said. “For men, it is OK, but not for women and children.’’ Kamel and his brother rented a 100-year-old house and transported their extended family of 27 the 120 miles to their temporary abode at dusk Friday. He returned to Baghdad on Saturday to close up their house. Of the eight families living on his street, he said, only two had chosen to remain.
“War seems to be never-ending here. I ask myself why and I can’t find a logical answer,’’ said another traveler, Sumer Abdel Jabbar, a 41-year-old engineer, as he packed up his two-story house in the Mustanseriya neighborhood of central Baghdad, preparing to head north. “I decided that we go, because of the children,’’ he said. “We cannot stay here and expose them to shock and fear every minute.’’
One man who requested anonymity said he didn’t know when he would return. “It is up to Bush and Saddam Hussein. We are on the other side of the curtain, and we don’t know how this movie ends.’’
Officials at the Information Ministry press center in the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad twice Saturday promised to take journalists to the airport to verify Al-Sahaf’s claim that it had been retaken. But the trip never materialized and instead journalists were driven in two buses around the city.
The tour yielded a few insights, however, showing freshly destroyed buildings from US bombings and new defensive lines being thrown up here and there, with sand berms, tanks and artillery pieces appearing for the first time on city streets.
Many armed men appeared to be rushing to the new defenses, but also striking was the number of positions in the city that appeared to have been abandoned. And outside the main bus station, there were signs that some men of military age were trying to flee. Although most city streets were empty, on the northern edge of Baghdad, thousands of cars, trucks and minivans full of people streamed out of the city heading north. They had packages and bales of all sizes tied on roof racks, and bags and blankets spilling out of open trunks.
On the southbound side of the street, a dozen tanks and APCs with dozens of soldiers in camouflage uniforms were spotted Saturday morning. The soldiers carried rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns and Kalashnikovs, and were singing songs and chanting pro-Saddam slogans.
As the tightly controlled tour by government functionaries continued, the fighting spirit was much in evidence also among activists of Saddam’s Baath Party in the Shaheed Adnan neighborhood in central Baghdad. The local party chief, Faeh Hamid, 58, was accompanied by seven party fighters from the neighborhood: a fisherman, a machine operator, an engineer, a book publisher, a stationary trader, a house painter and a law student. All had drawn 24-hour shifts of guard duty for the neighborhood Saturday (including four hours for sleep).
“Here we watch all the cars that cross the bridge and drive into our area,’’ Hamid explained. “All the party fighters live in the neighborhood, and they know every resident. One of our main tasks is to spot strangers. If we see a stranger we approach him and politely but firmly inquire about the nature of his business here.’’
The party men also are supposed to be ready to fight if the battle with the Americans comes to their neighborhood.
“We have enough small arms and ammunition to conduct serious street fighting for a long time,’’ he insisted, adding that he and some of his men recently had attended a special course on guerrilla and street fighting, and “we have a lot of men with rich combat experience from the time of war with Iran.’’
One of the fighters, Abdullah Fahmi, 45, a round-faced engineer, even described a chance meeting they had had with the son of the president.
“We were on night patrol, a jeep went (on) the bridge, and we signaled for it to stop. It was midnight. The jeep pulled over, and you know who came out?...Uday Saddam Hussein himself,’’ he recounted.
“He was personally checking the patrols in the city (and) thanked us for good work,’’ he said. “He was smiling and beaming and in high spirits. He asked us whether we need anything and then drove on.
“It was so good to see him.’’