View from Baghdad: Precious historical records were destroyed yesterday when two Iraqi libraries were set ablaze. But, as Lara Marlowe reports, there are some signs that normality is returning to the city
The interior of Iraq's National Library was still hot as a furnace when I entered it yesterday. The fire that destroyed the country's written memory was so intense that the marble floor slabs buckled and the concrete staircase fissured. A row of photocopiers on the ground floor were half-melted. Although the building's cement structure withstood the flames, everything else was charcoal and ash. Inside the blackened foyer, I found the remains of only one book. Its cinder-grey pages disintegrated into powder when I touched them.
That was when I saw Srour Kamal Suleiman (44) wandering through the ruin with an empty canvas bag.
"I am a civil engineer," he explained. "And I studied in this library in 1977. When I heard they'd set fire to it, I was very upset. This building was a treasure of knowledge; it held every book published in Iraq. I came here because I wanted to save some books, protect them until everything is okay, and give them back. But it's hopeless."
Behind the library, a small stack of books had somehow escaped incineration, and a boy piled them into the boot of Baghad taxi number 97164. When I tried to ask what he was doing, an old man, perhaps his grandfather, screamed at me and made angry gestures, and the book-pilferers drove away.
A few hours later, I saw similar people sitting beside piles of books on the pavement in Midan Square, between the burned-out Trade Ministry and the burned-out Governorate building. They doubtless could not read the books they had stolen and were hoping to earn a few dinars for their plunder. Two bare-foot boys squealed as they took turns pushing each other around on an office swivel chair.
Saddam Hussein's statue still stands on the esplanade in front of the library, clutching a book to its chest. Micro-fiches and file catalogue cards blow in the breeze. Behind the library, rows of filing cabinets are lined up on a vacant dirt strip.
A singed folder lay on the ground - part of the archives of the 1932-1958 Hashemite monarchy. In a ransacked but mostly unburned annex of the library lay Iraq's records of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, along with all the publications of Saddam Hussein's regime.
Now these records of Saddam's dreadful reign are about to be lost, along with the rare manuscripts which went up in flames. It is too much to hope that US forces will rush to safeguard documents when they allowed foreign embassies, ambassadors' residences and UN offices to be sacked, when they have not restored electricity or running water, when a chain of arson attacks continues to plague the city. Yesterday afternoon, I counted a dozen giant plumes of smoke from my hotel-room balcony.
As I left the National Library, I heard shooting down the street. Clouds of white smoke burst into the sky, slowly turning grey and then black. Flames shot up from a large building - a new fire, one of many in central Baghdad. This time it was the Islamic Library, part of the Ministry of Religious Affairs.
Ahmed Abed, the owner of a shop in Najib Pasha Street, watched it start. His photocopy shop is closed, for fear of looters, but he stays in the area to fight them off. "Some people are robbing, but others come only to set fires," he said. "They choose the place and they set fires - places that contain important papers."
Mr Suleiman had said the same thing in the National Library: "I don't think it was random. It was planned by someone who hates this country."
A colleague alerted the US Civil Affairs Unit at the Palestine Hotel that the Islamic Library, with its collection of Korans, had just started burning.
The US officer went on the radio saying: "There's a guy here who says there's a fire gone off at a Biblical library."
Three weeks of bombing, followed by six days of looting and arson, have left Baghdad in desperate condition. Yesterday, the looters continued picking the bones of the decimated city. Three bare-foot men perched on an overturned car, destroyed in the US assault on the city, cannibalising its parts.
I briefly mistook a toothless old woman and a little girl trundling a wheelbarrow through the filing cabinets behind the National Library for looters. They had come searching for broken pipes, from which to fill cans with water. "Please," the old woman said, "tell the Americans we want water and electricity."
The city's residents maintain a round-the-clock demonstration on Ferdoos Square, opposite the Palestine Hotel, in front of the US Marines' concertina of barbed wire, tanks and armoured personnel carriers.
"They are protecting the oil and leaving the stores, universities and hospitals," said one sign, in English. For the Palestine Hotel is the new seat of power, the modern equivalent of the Ottoman Bey's palace. Hundreds of desperate men and women crowd around the barbed wire in the hope of working for US forces, or for the journalists living in the hotel.
One woman tried to crawl under the barbed wire. Another got the black cloth of her chador entangled in the razor-sharp hooks. Iraqis know that most journalists have satellite telephones, and they crowd around us, begging to call relatives abroad. The messages are almost always the same: everyone is fine; we survived; try to send money.
Shorja market is still closed, but another Saddam statue was toppled there yesterday. A yellow crane nudged up to the dictator's waist and pushed. All traffic stopped as the statue broke in half and fell backwards. The volume of joy-shooting was proof of the number of Kalashnikovs in downtown Baghdad. The crowd fell upon the broken statue like wolves, tearing at it with shovels and axes, against the backdrop of the burned-out Central Bank building.
Yet, despite the looting and arson attacks, Baghdad almost came to life yesterday. There was heavy traffic in the morning, as thousands of residents returned from Diyala, a town 75 kilometres to the north-east to which they fled to escape the bombing.
A few city buses were back on the road and the radio appeals to Iraqis to resume their normal occupations. A neighbourhood traffic policeman rode his motorcycle through Karrada, trying to break up congestion. At least one Iraqi police car drove around with a video camera to intimidate looters.
Iraqi police officers have set up an office in the Palestine Hotel, under the protection of US Marines. US officers say thousands of policemen have reported for duty, and the first joint US-Iraqi patrols could start today. Only eight days ago, the same policemen drove round this same hotel with their sirens blaring, honking and waving flags and joy-shooting. But that was another epoque, and they were demonstrating in support of Saddam Hussein.