In the build-up to the invasion of Baghdad, Lara Marlowereported on a city and people under relentless bombardment. On its fifth anniversary, she recalls the launch of 'Operation Iraqi Freedom'
Five years ago this week, Iraq counted the days until George W Bush's ultimatum expired, as if waiting for the apocalypse. The Pentagon had threatened the most intense, sustained bombardment in modern history. US officials said they'd retaliate with tactical nukes if Saddam used chemical or biological weapons.
Over the preceding months, the residents of Baghdad had grown to accept the idea of their annihilation, as if they were to be punished for failing to overthrow their dictator. When the bombardment finally started, a few hours after the passing of the deadline Bush imposed for Saddam and his family to leave Iraq, it was almost a relief. Iraqis who had the means to escape had fled. Those who remained stocked up on mineral water, fuel, battery lamps, tinned food and gas masks. The government distributed rations for six months in advance. In the last days of the countdown, I saw tearful civil servants empty desk drawers in ministries marked for destruction. Anticipating the looting that would seize the capital when the regime fell, merchants hid their goods and bricked up shopfronts.
Until the regime fell on April 9th, its henchmen indulged in the usual threats and bluster. The wives and mothers of US servicemen would "cry tears of blood", warned Saddam's psychopathic son, Uday.
I saw a woman weep tears of blood, on April 2nd in Hilla, 100km south of Baghdad. She was Samira Murza Abdel Hamza, a 48-year-old housewife, and she'd been wounded by US cluster bombs, in an attack that killed some 60 civilians. Shrapnel had lodged in both Hamza's eyes, turning them bright red. Fragments of metal pierced her chest and knees.
Uday Saddam Hussein and his brother Qusay would be gunned down by US Marines in Mosul four months later. Uday's prediction that Americans would not be safe "anywhere in Iraq or in the world" has, alas, come true. True too, the Iraqi government's declaration that Saddam Hussein was born in Iraq and would die in Iraq.
The US fired the opening salvoes at dawn on the morning of March 20th, bombing a disused farm on the outskirts of Baghdad. (It was still March 19th in Washington, the reason the date varies.) In the centre of the capital, anti-aircraft artillery rattled on for half an hour, accompanied by barking dogs, chirping birds and the muezzin's prayer call. Saddam went on television to announce that "the insane Bush . . . has started a war against Iraq". But the dawn bombardment was just an appetiser, a distant clap of thunder before US forces got down to serious business on the night of March 20th to 21st, the night of "shock and awe".
As deafening explosions shook the city, huge golden fireballs spread across the presidential complex on the west side of the Tigris river, then burned like bonfires all night. It was a spectacle of unimaginable violence, but because we could not see the US bombers and warships that launched the cruise missiles, it seemed like a natural disaster, perhaps a volcanic eruption. From the Palestine Hotel, across the Tigris from the complex, some 300 journalists transmitted this sound and fury to the outside world.
ALMOST DAILY FOR three weeks, officials from the Iraqi ministry of information would show us bombed-out buildings, the wounded and dying. The bombardment rarely let up, but was especially heavy at night. The Iraqis burned tyres and oil-filled berms in the hope of disorienting US missile guidance systems. The smoke mixed with desert sandstorms, turning Baghdad into a sinister twilight zone where men wrapped keffiehs around their faces to breathe and cars used their headlights even at midday. Jet engines roared constantly in the sky overhead. Explosions were so frequent that no one noticed unless they were nearby.
On March 26th, US missiles struck morning traffic in Ash-Shaab, a neighbourhood of car repair garages in northwest Baghdad. Seventeen people were killed, including a mother and her three children, two restaurant workers, a mechanic, the owner of an electrical shop and the neighbourhood beggar.
I would see worse things in the course of the war, but the attack on Ash-Shaab stuck in my mind. Dirty rain, saturated with smoke and desert sand, coated my face, clothing and notebook. In the muddy devastation of Abi Taleb street, oil from the mechanics' shops swirled in sickening pools with the victims' blood.
Hisham Danoon, a dazed building supervisor who had seen four men cut to pieces by the missile, pointed at a hand lying in the mud. "That was my friend Tahar," he said. The hand was yellowed, no doubt by tobacco. Its fingers curled, and it was crimson red at the wrist where it had been severed. I thought of a chicken chopped into pieces by a butcher's cleaver. "There is Tahar's brain," Danoon continued, pointing at a viscous mound between two shards of corrugated steel roofing.
At Ash-Shaab, I learned days later, a Belgian colleague saw a scud missile launcher in a side-street, a fact US forces used to justify the attack on the civilian district. Fifty-five more Baghdadis were killed in a similar attack on the Shu'ala market two days later.
On April 3rd, US forces reached the outskirts of Baghdad. That night, at the onset of a 24-hour battle for Baghdad airport, the electricity and running water went down. The regime had tried to keep its military casualties secret. The following day, there was no attempt to hide the dozens of maimed and bleeding men who filled the Yarmook hospital to overflowing.
The southern and western parts of the capital were now the front line. Burned-out Iraqi armoured personnel carriers, gun batteries and jeeps dotted the roadsides like dead insects. Soldiers and militiamen were everywhere. Army lorries drove past with corpses stacked on their flat beds. Within days, I would see the blackened, bloated remains of motorists killed by US tank fire as the invaders secured a key interchange on Dora highway.
ON APRIL 7TH, I was awakened by the clatter of F-18 bombers, the whinnying of A-10 "tank-buster" aircraft, artillery and small arms fire. The Americans had arrived in central Baghdad, and were taking over the presidential complex which they would turn into the Green Zone, their occupation headquarters.
Again, the journalists in the Palestine Hotel were placed front row centre. We watched some 30 Iraqi soldiers flee their bunkers and artillery emplacements to run along the bottom of the river embankment as US Bradley APC vehicles took position above them. An Iraqi wearing only white underwear and a vest appeared to have been caught sleeping.
Three journalists were killed on April 8th, the last full day of Saddam's reign. Tariq Ayoub, a Jordanian correspondent for al-Jazeera television, was broadcasting from the roof of the station's office, on the west bank near the presidential complex, when a US aircraft fired a rocket at him. Al-Jazeera had received assurances from the US government that it would not be attacked.
Two US Abrams tanks moved onto Jumhuriya bridge. One trained its turret on the Palestine Hotel and fired a shell, killing Taras Protsyuk, a cameraman for Reuters television, and Jose Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish channel Tele 5.
The US military did not admit it had killed the journalists until France 3 showed its videotape of the tank firing, followed by the hotel shaking two seconds later.
April 9th will forever be the anniversary of al-suqut, the fall. West Baghdad, al-Karkh, was now secured by the Americans. But Baghdad Risafa, the east bank where the Palestine Hotel is located, still hovered in limbo. Another US division approached via Saddam City, the Shia slums in the northeast of the capital.
Though fighting continued, especially on the bridges, we decided to visit the Saddam Medical Centre. Nothing in three weeks of war had prepared me for what I saw in the hospital lobby. The wounded were lined up on trolleys and on the floor. Some were bandaged or covered in burn cream. Others waited with open wounds to be treated. Limbs dangled by pieces of bone or flesh. An orderly pushed pools of blood with a mop.
Dr Khaldoun al-Bayati, the director of the hospital, was the heroic captain of a sinking ship. He had not slept for six nights, and did not know where his wife and children were. US troops on the far side of the river kept lobbing shells onto the hospital grounds, because it was located opposite the defence ministry and the army had hidden armour in the oleander shrubs outside. With each explosion, shrieks of terror punctuated the moans of the wounded.
We waited for a lull and sped back to the Palestine Hotel. My Iraqi "minder", a colonel in the mokhabarat(intelligence service), ran away to hide at his sister's home. I talked to the Arab fighters who sat cross-legged under the portico of the Palestine. They were afraid the local population would lynch them, and contemplated surrender to US forces. "Why does this always happen to the Arabs?" an Algerian asked me.
Saddam Hussein claimed there were thousands of Arabs eager to sacrifice themselves for his regime. These hungry, thirsty fighters had been abandoned by their Iraqi commanders. But they vanished before the Americans arrived. Later, when Arabs began carrying out suicide attacks, I wondered if they were the men I'd talked to on April 9th.
The Americans were coming. In the afternoon sun, I walked down Yassir Arafat street until I saw the endless line of sand-coloured tanks and APCs rolling towards me. Their supplies were strapped onto the sides of the armour, like camels in the desert. Wearing goggles, helmets and body armour, the soldiers trained their M-16s at the Iraqis who watched from the roadside.
Looters swarmed in the wake of the US convoy. The first one I saw, a teenager in a grimy tracksuit, pushed a medical X-ray machine down the pavement. As the Americans set up in the Palestine Hotel, the looters fanned out through the city, sacking government ministries, embassies, UN offices. Arsonists set fires that burned for days across the city. The Americans did nothing to stop them.
Several hundred Iraqis gathered on Ferdoos Square, outside the Palestine Hotel. They tore the plaque off the base of Saddam Hussein's statue, then attacked it with a sledge hammer. US Marine Sgt Leon C Lambert from Colorado asked his commanding officer, Lt Col. Bryan McCoy, for permission to tear down the statue. It was, McCoy said, a job for the Iraqi people. The people tried for 45 minutes and McCoy relented. The Iraqis placed a cable, noose-like, around the neck of Saddam's effigy, and Sgt Lambert's M88 tank retriever tugged at the statue. It cracked at the shins, teetered and slowly fell. The mob stamped on it, hacked its head off and dragged it around the square with a chain.
The world had its iconic image of Saddam's fall, but Iraq's nightmare was only beginning.