BAGHDAD, 4 April 2003 — All day, I had asked myself about the supposed American assault-to-come on Baghdad. Where were the panicking crowds? Where were the food queues? Where were the empty streets? True, the motorway to the airport was a spooky, lonely journey. But the center of Baghdad was more lively than for many days.
The city authorities have put more of their Chinese double-decker buses back on the streets — normal service, as they say, has been resumed — and the railway company claimed its trains were still leaving for northern Iraq.
At lunchtime, I dropped into the Furud Takeaway for my daily fix of chicken ‘shish-taouk’, tomatoes and green beans. It was packed with Shiite families, the ladies in black chadors, the men largely bearded, chomping through giant ‘mezzes’ of ‘hoummus’ and ‘tabouleh’ and lamb and rice.
The television was showing an Iranian channel, a musical in the Persian language — Iranian TV has two Arabic channels whose signal can be picked up without a satellite dish — and many Baghdadis trust their news service more than that of Kuwaiti or other Gulf television.
Near the Rafidiyeh Bridge, in a canyon of traffic, I caught sight of a middle-aged man staring at the great monument to Saddam’s “victory” in the 1980-88 war with Iran. At the base of a column, iron, helmeted soldiers stand behind iron sandbags, firing an iron machine gun at their Persian enemies, an iron soldier throwing an iron grenade in the same direction.
There is this monument to military victory in Baghdad, a monument to the “martyrs” of that victory — perhaps half a million of them — and a monument to the unknown soldier of that same war. Ex-prisoners asked for a monument to their suffering — in eight years, there were 60,000 of them — but their request was officially turned down.
Was that to emphasize the humiliation of surrender? Is this a lesson for the young Iraqi soldiers of today whose combat troops I saw on the road south of Baghdad on Wednesday, jumping from their trucks in steel helmets and flak jackets?
Each night, I can hear the drumbeat of explosions and cluster bombs west of the city. Who is dying there? The Chief of Staff of the Republican Guards’ Baghdad Division announces that he has suffered only 17 dead and 35 wounded.
Every morning, the newspaper ‘Qaddisiyeh’ carries a detailed battle report from the front lines — always supposing there is a front line — which includes unit numbers and brigades. On Wednesday, for example, the newspaper informed its readers that the Americans failed to cut the Al Kut to Baghdad highway, that Iraqi forces destroyed 14 US tanks in the province of Diwaniyeh, that the 704th, 424th and 504th Brigades of the Iraqi Army’s 3rd Army Corps prevented a US thrust near Suq El-Shuqh. And so on and so forth.
Whether this represents anything like the battles which the Iraqis believe they are fighting will await the inquiries of historians. Thus another long day, peppered with the rumble of faraway detonations, closed at Baghdad airport last night, dusk falling over the grimy terminals with their painted exhortations of “Down, Down America” and the airport’s director, Wafa Abdullah Jabbouri, announcing that “there is no-one at the airport, you can see it’s completely safe, even the workers still turn up each day.” No doubt they do. And while there’s a large complex of buildings blown to pieces by missiles a mile away and the airport radar system is ‘hors de combat’ after an early raid by American or British jets, Jabbouri appeared to be correct.
Had the Americans found themselves miles away on the edge of the old RAF airbase at Habbaniyeh, one wondered, and confused it with the airport outside Baghdad? Had they sent a patrol up to the far side of the Saddam airport for a few minutes, just to say they’d been there? Back in 1941, a German patrol briefly captured the last tram-stop on the line west of Moscow, collecting the discarded passenger tickets as souvenirs — and then got no further.
But few here believe the Americans cannot bash their way into Baghdad if they really want to. After all, Napoleon got to Moscow in the end. I guess it’s the same old question.
The Russians could hold Stalingrad because they loved Russia as much as they feared Marshal Stalin. Does that equation of patriotism and dictatorship apply to the Iraqis? Messers Bush and Blair must hope it does not.
