SAFWAN, 24 March 2003 — Civilians in southern Iraq are beginning to wonder if the US and British troops who have captured their towns are liberators or occupiers. “I swear it was better when Saddam was here,” said Jamal Kathim, as his angry friends nodded in agreement.
Iraqis in the predominantly Shiite south had high hopes for stability at the start of a four-day-old war that US President George W. Bush said would liberate them.
Instead many are struggling to find food, water and medicine when they leave their mud huts and wander along highways through coalition checkpoints. Shiite emotions are caught between fears of Saddam’s troops returning and fury over what they say is the failure of coalition troops so far to deliver on the humanitarian front.
When Iraqis are not worrying about food supplies, they wonder why US helicopters have swooped down on their villages and allegedly fired on civilian vehicles.
The dead and wounded are sometimes rushed to a British-controlled checkpoint near Safwan, a town of 16,000. “All I can do is change the bandage,” said a British soldier to a wounded Iraq civilian with shrapnel in his leg.
Hospital officials in Safwan said they have treated about 40 civilians who were injured or killed in air raids by coalition forces since the conflict started.
“We try to move the wounded to bigger hospitals and we find American forces pointing guns at us at checkpoints,” said Fadil Abbas, the director of the Safwan hospital, pointing to a stretcher with a blood stain.
Other residents of Safwan, where the Iraqis and coalition forces signed a cease-fire after the 1991 Gulf War, said coalition forces are preventing them from retrieving the corpses of 200 Iraqi soldiers in a nearby town.
After hospital officials placed two civilians in a mosque before burial, teenagers gathered at a petrol station that had been looted, walking barefoot in gasoline and siphoning it for a few dollars. “The Americans and British said it was going to be a liberation but this is an occupation,” said Majid, 15.
In the countryside, women in black shawls scrubbed clothes in dirty water. Other Iraqis sat outside their huts watching coalition troops crawl along the desert floor and tanks rumble across a highway, their treads ripping up the tarmac.
An electricity pylon that was destroyed by coalition bombing and burnt out Iraqi tanks reminded them of the war that had raised hopes among Shi’ites.
Many have bitter memories of their 1991 rebellion against Saddam, which was ruthlessly crushed after the Americans left.
Frustrations were palpable at a checkpoint where an Iraqi man was urgently trying to tell an American soldier something about a nearby power plant. “He doesn’t understand me. There are four Iraqis who work for the government who won’t let us go in there to look for our relatives because it was shelled. The men have guns,” said the man. “Why don’t they listen?”
