BAGHDAD, 12 April 2003 — Outside the Canal Hotel, former headquarters of the United Nations here, scores of men waited like vultures Thursday and eyed the fleet of white four-wheel-drive Land Cruisers.
Maybe it was the lure of the unobtainable — the Land Cruisers were one of the few prizes left in this city not already grabbed. They were being protected by 2nd Battalion, 23rd Marines. And the Marines weren’t letting the cars go.
In this city no longer under Saddam Hussein’s control, but not fully under anyone else’s either, plunderers have swept in like a plague of locusts, brazenly breaking into government offices, diplomatic residences, banks, even hospitals, and carting off whatever they can.
In contrast to the celebrations of a day before, Baghdad seemed like a lawless frontier, as US forces chased down pockets of resistance from Fedayeen fighters and tried to protect themselves from sneak attacks such as a suicide bombing Thursday night in Saddam City that seriously wounded four Americans.
Although the Marines have now been given orders to stop the looting, there was no sign that order had been implemented. With all the thievery, barely a shop or business dared to open. Residents of some neighborhoods set up barricades to try to protect their streets. Many people stayed at home, peering out their windows in fear.
At the tiny Gardenia supermarket in the Zayouna district in east Baghdad, proprietor Ali Abbas, grizzled in white skullcap and long gray robe, accosted a pair of American customers and pleaded: “Please, we need our peace and security. These are not good people, and they are stealing everything. We cannot sleep at night because they are really bandits.’’
The US forces’ hands-off policy had encouraged the looters to more and more thefts, such as when they broke into the vacant German Embassy in Karada Street, helping themselves to chairs, desks, fans and air conditioners.
One looter was so eager to get inside that he tried to climb through concertina wire and got himself hopelessly hung up.
Hamid Hilla, a 35-year-old computer technician, said he hopes that the US-British alliance quickly imposes martial law to stop the pillaging.
“They could ask the police to come back to work, and many of them would,’’ he said. “They could ask the electricity workers and the water workers as well. We need these services. These services are very important.’’
So far, few private homes have been broken into, he acknowledged. “Not yet,’’ he said, “but maybe they will try when they get done with the government buildings. This is why we are afraid.’’
There were scenes of looting on almost every street.
Crowds of people looted the ministries of higher education and of industry. In nearby Nidal Street, people were carrying off chairs, sofas, frames, mirrors, ventilators. Men, women and children got into the act.
“I think we can use this in the house,’’ said an 8-year-old boy, Ayad Umar, struggling down the road with a huge floor lamp. “Why shouldn’t I take it? Everybody is doing it. Look.’’
Hospitals and clinics were not spared, causing even some of those vital facilities to lock their doors.
“At night, some bad people came and they took away a lot of medicines and drugs and they stole two of our ambulances,’’ said Safaa Hashemy, a surgeon at Al-Kindi Hospital.
“We can’t really operate properly without medicines and drugs, and we need the ambulances to send out to help people,’’ she said.
An Iraqi soldier, Hiethan Faisal, 28, pulled up outside the Industry Ministry in a military truck that had been badly repainted white. “I took this truck from the barracks,’’ he explained. “Everybody ran away. Why leave it there to be destroyed? So I repainted it yesterday, and now I am a truck driver.’’
On the opposite side of the Tigris River, a robed woman fresh from the Al Mansour Hotel, where smoke still billowed from an outbuilding, held a jar of orange marmalade in one hand while dragging a mattress down Haifa Street.
Deeper into the neighborhoods on the west bank, which quickly dissolve into dilapidated slums, residents broke into the National Museum with its rare antiquities, and plundered tiny, rundown restaurants and stores.
In one scene, a looter held a ceiling fan and a blow-up Santa Claus doll, taken from a government-owned shopping complex. His path to what appeared to be a massive public-housing project was studded with empty boxes and the smashed marble of dropped floor tiling ripped from ministry buildings.
In another, mothers held children while fathers pushed away cars and motorcycles from the parking lots of the Information Ministry. Inside, the marble fountains were dry, biographies of Saddam lay scattered and a 6-foot-high bust of the dictator stared impassively.
Still, there was a methodical discipline to the looting. There were no fights over goods, and no apparent rush to get away. Residents waved and smiled at reporters and soldiers, at times asking “OK?’’ and pointing to their plunder in a bid for official sanction of their crime.
Meanwhile, hungry residents weary of war clamored to cross bridges blocked by tanks and the twisted wreckage of cars, some of them with charred corpses still sprawled on the seats.
As the only visible source of authority, Marines and army soldiers at checkpoints often had to become judge and jury.
The bloodied, beaten and accused were turned over by angry Iraqis to confused US troops who could not decide whether they had the right to detain them.
Those same troops, desperate to keep a mob from rushing the bridges across the Tigris, for a while threatened to fire at journalists trying to cross into US-controlled territory from their hotels on the east bank.
While US checkpoints saw tense standoffs and even a few warning shots fired, many troops for the first time also heard words of praise coming from Iraqis for toppling the Saddam regime.
“I had one kid come up to me and say, ‘I love America, Bruce Springsteen, Born in the U.S.A.’ ‘’ said Jerry Duvall, 20, of Columbia, Ky., from Cyclone Company of the 4th Battalion, 64th Armor Regiment.