April 10, 2003
By JOHN F. BURNS
BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 9 — Saddam Hussein’s rule collapsed in a matter of
hours today across much of this capital city as ordinary Iraqis took to
the streets in their thousands to topple Mr. Hussein’s statues, loot
government ministries and interrogation centers and to give a cheering,
often tearful welcome to advancing American troops.
After three weeks battling their way north from Kuwait against Mr.
Hussein’s hard-core loyalists, Army and Marine Corps units moving into
the districts of eastern Baghdad where many of the city’s five million
people live finally met the kind of adulation from ordinary Iraqis that
American advocates of a war to topple Mr. Hussein had predicted.
Amid the celebration, many of Mr. Hussein’s troops and officials simply
abandoned their posts and ran away.
Much of Baghdad became, in a moment, a showcase of unbridled enthusiasm
for America, as much as it metamorphosed into a crucible of unbridled
hatred for Mr. Hussein and his 24-year rule.
American troops, but almost as much any Westerner caught up in the tide
of people rushing into the streets, were met with scenes that summoned
comparisons to the freeing of Eastern Europe 14 years ago.
There was no word on the fate of Mr. Hussein or his sons, Uday and
Qusay, targeted by American bombs in a western residential area on
Monday. But his whereabouts — even his very existence — seemed
irrelevant as American Marines used an M88 tank recovery vehicle to
topple a large statue of Mr. Hussein in the central Firdos Square.
Crowds surged forward to stomp on the downed statue, whose head had
briefly been covered in an American flag, and several men dragged its
severed head through the streets.
A burly 39-year-old man named Qifa, assigned by Mr. Hussein’s
Information Ministry to keep watch on an American reporter, paused at
midmorning, outside the inferno that had been the headquarters of
Iraq’s National Olympic Committee, to ask the reporter to grip his
hand. The building, used to torture and kill opponents of Mr. Hussein,
had been one of the most widely feared places in Iraq.
“Touch me, touch me, tell me that this is real, tell me that the
nightmare is really over,” the man said, tears running down his face.
It was real, at last. When the city awoke to find that the American
capture on Monday of the government quarter in west Baghdad had been
followed overnight by a deep American thrust into the city’s eastern
half, the fear ingrained in most Iraqis evaporated.
Iraqis on foot, on motor scooters, in cars and minivans and trucks,
alone and in groups, children and adults and elderly, headed for any
point on the map where American troops had taken up positions — at
expressway junctions, outside the United Nations headquarters, at two
hotels on the Tigris river where Western journalists had been
sequestered by Mr. Hussein’s government — and erupted with enthusiasm.
Shouts to the American soldiers of “Thank you, mister, thank you,” in
English, of “Welcome, my friend, welcome,” of “Good, good, good,” and
“Yes, yes, mister,” mingled with cries of “Good, George Bush!” and
“Down Saddam!”
But reporters who crossed one of the deserted midtown bridges across
the Tigris into the western area of the city discovered quickly that
Mr. Hussein’s hold has not been wholly broken.
Crossing the 14th of July bridge into the district of Atafiya, about
five miles upriver from the Republican Palace compound that American
troops seized on Monday, the reporters found themselves at least a mile
north of the most advanced American positions on the west side of the
river, in a neighborhood filled with angry, nervous-looking fedayeen —
the irregular forces who have been among the most relentless enemies of
the Americans in their 300-mile drive from Kuwait.
One reporter, lulled into a false sense of security by a day of Iraqis
vilifying Mr. Hussein, approached a group of youths at an intersection
to ask how they felt.
“Bush good?” the reporter asked, using the English phrase that had
become the mantra of the city’s eastern districts to overcome the
temporary absence of an interpreter.
The youths, quickly joined by older, more threatening-looking men with
Kalashnikov rifles and shoulder-holstered rockets, responded with a
hostility that could have been found almost anywhere in the city until
dawn today.
“Bush down shoes!” the youths answered, one of them spitting on the
ground, meaning that President Bush was good only for being trampled
on. “America down shoes!”
American commanders in the city barely paused to soak up the
celebrations before warning tonight that much hard work remained to be
done in extending the pockets of American control in east and west
Baghdad into areas that remained no-man’s lands, or worse, pockets of
active resistance.
Those pockets were clearly still dangerous today, but they were also
isolated. Many people seemed joyous. A middle-aged man pushed through a
crowd attempting to topple a Saddam statue outside the oil ministry
with a bouquet of paper flowers, and passed among American troops
distributing them one at a time, each with a kiss on the cheek.
A woman with two small children perched in the open roof of a car
maneuvering to get close to a Marine Corps unit assisting in toppling a
Hussein statue outside the Palestine and Sheraton hotels, the quarters
for foreign journalists, wept as she shouted, “Thank you, mister, thank
you very much.”
The American breakthrough came with stunning speed, only six days after
American troops gained their first foothold in Baghdad with the seizure
of the city’s international airport, and after many military experts
had predicted it could take weeks, even months, to besiege Mr.
Hussein’s forces and overcome them.
The American advances that began on Tuesday night, from the
southeastern edges of a city plunged into pitch darkness by the failure
of the city’s electricity grid, resulted by nightfall today in
extending American control over a wide southeastern quadrant of the
city up to the Tigris river’s eastern bank.
To this could be added the American occupation of the government
quarter on the river’s west bank, an area of several square miles that
includes many of the principal seats of Mr. Hussein’s power, including
his main palaces and many government ministries, after a fierce daylong
battle on Monday.
How far American troops enlarged that western foothold in a day of
light skirmishing today was not clear.
On the eastern side of the river, even in no-man’s areas where the
American troops had not yet reached, virtually every Iraqi reporters
encountered among crowds that totaled in the tens of thousands, showed
disdain for Mr. Hussein.
One group of young men who marched out of Saddam City, an impoverished
district that is home to perhaps two million Shiite Muslims — among the
most repressed of all Mr. Hussein’s victims — were asked as they dashed
from one American armored vehicle to another with their handshakes and
the cries of welcome why a visitor to Saddam City just a few days ago
had heard only the quietest whispers of dissent.
“Because we were frightened,” one young man said. “We were frightened
of being killed.”
A few moments earlier, another man, a 27-year-old student named Raad,
had approached to voice the deep suspicions that had been sown among
Iraqis by experience with previous uprisings against Mr. Hussein that
had surged for a day, sometimes for a week, only to be savagely
repressed.
“The question is, what happens tomorrow?” Raad, a clothing salesman,
said, in faltering English. “To this moment I cannot believe we got rid
of Saddam Hussein. Where is he? Is he died? We don’t know it. Is he
going to come back and kill us all Iraqis, to use chemical weapons? We
do not know it.”
One man, an official in the Oil Ministry, said flatly that any
government, “Saddam Hussein or no,” would be better than any imposed by
the United States.
But of the main message that Iraqis wanted transmitted to the world
there could be no reasonable doubt: they had yearned secretly for years
to be rid of Saddam Hussein but had been too cowed to say so.
Throughout the day, there was no sign of Mr. Hussein’s vaunted
Republican Guard. One Marine soldier encountered at a junction on the
Canal Expressway, running north-south across Baghdad’s eastern
outskirts, expressed his astonishment and relief. “We didn’t meet a
single armed Iraqi all night,” he said. “They’re gone. Just run right
away.”
Down the expressway to the south, past the abandoned United Nations
headquarters and on for at least five miles, the median strip on the
expressway, and a sliproad running beside, were littered with abandoned
Iraqi tanks, armored personnel carriers and mobile artillery guns, most
of them marked with the red triangle flash of the Republican Guard.
Camouflaged Iraqi uniforms and combat boots lay strewn near many of the
vehicles, suggesting that the soldiers hastened into civilian clothes
as they fled. Inside the tanks and armored carriers lay half-finished
meals, and half-drunk cans of soda.
As with Iraqi troops, so it was with most officials who until days ago
were swearing undying fealty to Mr. Hussein. The information minister,
Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, who gained a reputation earlier in the war for
daily news conferences that verged on the delusional, failed to show up
today at the Palestine hotel. His last words on Tuesday were: “I now
inform you that you are too far from reality.”
Reporters visiting the headquarters of the General Security
Directorate, almost the most feared agency in Iraq until today, found
its sprawling compound near the United Nations offices empty of all but
a handful of looters.
As the reporters probed down corridors and into inner courtyards, they
came across two heavyset men, sweating heavily, who had much of the
thuggish appearance, and now the hunted look, of men who thought they
might have something to answer for.
The men denied that they were officials of the directorate, which had a
reputation for detaining thousands of Iraqis, and executing many of
them without trial, but they refused to say what other reason they
might have for being in the compound. Perhaps apprehensive that the
reporters might turn them in to the Americans, they lingered,
deflecting questions about the directorate and its work, all the time
glancing nervously towards the gates onto the street.
When asked where the detainees were, the men said they had all fled
three days ago, when American troops entered the heart of Baghdad from
the west. How had they fled from locked cells? The men said they did
not know. And how many detainees were there, a reporter asked. “Nobody
ever knew,” one man replied. “They were kept in the tunnels
underground. They never saw the day.”
In Saddam City, the Shiite enclave on Baghdad’s northeastern rim, years
of repression by Mr. Hussein, a Sunni Muslim, were thrown off today.
From shortly after dawn on, word passed like wildfire through the
refuse-strewn streets that every police station, every office of the
ruling Baath Party, every military barracks, every outpost of the
security and intelligence network, had been abandoned, many of them so
fast that Mr. Hussein’s loyalists had left behind Kalashnikov rifles,
pistols and in some cases, even machine guns.
Saddam City, in effect, had been captured without even the Americans
having to fire a shot.
Muslim clerics quickly organized an event that could not hardly have
been dreamed of as late as Monday night: the re-opening of Al Mohsen
mosque, the central place of worship for all Shiites in Saddam City,
which was closed four years ago after Republican Guard units opened
fire on demonstrators who gathered around the mosque in protesting
against the killing of one of Iraq’s most venerable Shiite clerics.
By lunchtime today, more than 1,000 people had gathered in and around
the cool courtyard of the mosque, and crammed inside to hear the chief
cleric, Sheik Amer al-Minshidawi, give the first sermon there in years
from a raised wooden throne that serves as a pulpit.
His message was directed only in part at Mr. Hussein. “We have to
repair everything that has been destroyed by the tyrant Saddam,” he
said. Then, he quickly moved on to a message for Americans.
An American Jewish scholar, he said, without giving a name, had
described Islam as a “religion of terrorism.” It was the duty of the
duty of Shiites in Iraq, he said, now that they had been liberated by
American troops, to prove that allegation wrong. “We must teach the
world that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance and love.”