The Great War for Civilisation (197 page)

And now his soldiers—and the civilians of Iraq—were paying the price. I ventured out on 5 April, in a fast car with a government driver who had already been “bought” by
The Independent
and was now loyal to Fisk rather than Saddam. It was just as well. We drove at speed towards the airport, then turned back towards the city as we heard the power-diving of jets. These were glimpses of fear and death, mere sketches to take back with me to fill out the front page of our Sunday on this last weekend of the invasion. Beside the highway, a squad of troops was stacking grenades as the ground beneath us vibrated with the impact of U.S. air strikes. The area was called Qadisiya. It was Iraq's last front line. An Iraqi armoured vehicle was still smouldering, a cloud of blue-grey smoke rising above the plane trees under which its crew had been sheltering. Two trucks were burnt out on the other side of the road. The American Apache helicopters had left just a few minutes before we arrived. A squad of soldiers, flat on their stomachs, were setting up an anti-armour weapon on the weed-strewn pavement, aiming at the empty airport motorway for the first American tanks to come thrashing down the highway.

A truck crammed with more than a hundred Iraqi troops, many in blue uniforms, all of them carrying rifles that gleamed in the morning sunlight, sped past me towards the airport. A few made victory signs in the direction of my car—my driver was touching 145 kilometres an hour on the speedometer—but of course one had to ask what their hearts were telling them. “Up the line to death” was the phrase that came to mind. Two miles away, at the Yarmouk hospital, the surgeons stood in the car park in bloodstained overalls; they had already handled their first intake of military casualties.

A few hours later, an Iraqi minister was to tell the world that the Republican Guard had just retaken the airport from the Americans, that they were under fire but had won “a great victory.” Around Qadisiya it didn't look that way. Tank crews were gunning their T-72s down the highway past the main Baghdad railway yards in a convoy of armoured personnel carriers and jeeps and clouds of thick blue exhaust fumes. The more modern T-82s, the last of the Soviet-made fleet of battle tanks, sat hull-down around Jordan Square with a clutch of armoured vehicles. Across vast fields of sand and dirt and palm groves, I saw batteries of Sam-6 anti-aircraft missiles and multiple Katyusha rocket-launchers awaiting the American advance. The soldiers around them looked relaxed, some smoking cigarettes in the shade of the palm trees or sipping fruit juice brought to them by the residents of Qadisiya whose homes—heaven help them—were now in the firing line.

But then a white-painted Japanese pick-up truck pulled out in front of our car. At first, I thought the soldiers on the back were sleeping, covered in blankets to keep them warm. Yet I had opened my car window to keep cool this early summer morning and I realised that all the soldiers—there must have been fifteen of them in the little truck—were lying on top of each other, all with their heavy black military boots dangling over the tailboard. The two living soldiers on the vehicles sat with their feet wedged between the corpses. So did America's first victims of the day go to their eternal rest.

DAWN ON 6 APRIL started with a series of massive vibrations, a great “stomping” sound that physically shook my room. Stomp, Stomp, Stomp, it went. I lay in bed trying to fathom the cause. It was like the moment in
Jurassic Park
when the tourists first hear the footfalls of the tyrannosaur, an ever-increasing, ever more frightening thunder of regular, monstrous heartbeats. From my window on the east bank of the Tigris, I saw an Iraqi anti-aircraft gun firing from the roof of a white four-storey building half a mile away, shooting straight across the river at something on the opposite bank. Stomp, Stomp, it went again, the sound so enormous that it set off the burglar alarms in a thousand cars along the riverbank.

And it was only when I stood on the roadway a few minutes later that I knew what had happened. Not since the last Gulf War in 1991 had I heard the sound of American artillery fire. And there, only a few hundred metres away on the far bank of the Tigris, I saw them. At first they looked like tiny armoured centipedes, stopping and starting, dappled brown and grey, weird little creatures that had come to inspect an alien land and search for water.

You had to keep your eye on the centipedes to interpret reality, to realise that each creature was a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, that its tail was a cluster of U.S. Marines hiding for cover behind the armour, moving forward together each time their protection revved its engines and manoeuvred closer to the Tigris. There was a burst of gunfire from the Americans, a smart clatter of rocket-propelled grenades and puffs of white smoke from the Iraqi soldiers and militiamen dug into their foxholes and trenches on the same riverbank further south. It was that quick and that simple and that awesome.

Indeed, the sight was so extraordinary, so unexpected—despite all the Pentagon boasts and Bush promises—that one somehow forgot the precedents that it was setting for the future history of the Middle East. Amid the crack of gunfire, the tracer streaking across the river and the huge oil fires that the Iraqis lit to give them cover to retreat, one had to look away—to the great river bridges farther north, into the pale green waters of that most ancient of rivers—to realise that a Western army on a moral crusade had broken through to the heart of an Arab city for the first time since Maude marched into this same city of Baghdad in 1917 and Allenby into Jerusalem in 1918. But Allenby entered Jerusalem on foot, in reverence for Christ's birthplace, and yesterday's American thrust into Baghdad had neither humility nor honour about it.

The marines and Special Forces who spread out along the west bank of the river broke into Saddam Hussein's largest palace, filmed its lavatories and bathrooms and lay resting on its lawns before moving down towards the Rashid Hotel and sniping at both soldiers and civilians. Hundreds of Iraqi men, women and children were brought in agony to Baghdad's hospitals in the hours that followed, victims of bullets, shrapnel and cluster bombs. We could see the twin-engined American A-10s firing their depleted-uranium rounds into the far shore of the river.

From the eastern bank, I watched the marines run towards a ditch with rifles to their shoulders to search for Iraqi troops. But their enemies went on firing from the mudflats to the south until, one after another, I saw them running for their lives. The Iraqis clambered out of their foxholes amid the American shellfire and began an Olympics of terror along the waterside; most kept their weapons, some fell back to an exhausted walk, others splashed right into the waters of the Tigris, up to their knees, even their necks. Three soldiers climbed from a trench with their hands in the air, in front of a group of marines. But others fought on. The Stomp, Stomp, Stomp of the American guns went on for more than an hour. Then the A-10s came back, and an F-18 fighter-bomber that sent a ripple of fire along the trenches, after which the shooting died away.

It seemed as if Baghdad would fall within hours. But the day was to be characterised with that most curious of war's attributes, a crazed mixture of normality, death and high farce. For even as the Americans were fighting their way north up the river and the F-18s were returning to bombard the bank, Sahaf, the Iraqi minister of information, turned up to give a press conference on the roof of the Palestine Hotel, scarcely half a mile from the battle. As shells exploded to his left and the air was shredded by the power-diving American jets, Mohamed Sahaf announced to perhaps a hundred journalists that the whole thing was a propaganda exercise, the Americans were no longer in possession of Baghdad airport, reporters must “check their facts and re-check their facts—that's all I ask you to do.” Mercifully, the oil fires, bomb explosions and cordite smoke now obscured the western bank of the river so that fact-checking could no longer be accomplished by looking past Sahaf's shoulder.

What the world wanted to know, of course, was if Baghdad was about to be occupied, whether the Iraqi government would surrender and—the Mother of All Questions—where was Saddam? But Sahaf used his time to condemn Al-Jazeera for its bias towards the United States and to excoriate the Americans for using “the lounges and halls” of Saddam Hussein to make “cheap propaganda.” The Americans “will be buried here,” he shouted above the battle. “Don't believe these invaders. They will be defeated.” Only a week ago, Sahaf had informed us that the Americans would acquire graves in the desert. Now their place of interment had moved to the city. And the more he spoke, the more we wanted to interrupt Sahaf, to say, “But hang on, Mr. Minister, take a look over your right shoulder.” But of course, there was only smoke over his right shoulder. Why didn't we all take a drive around town, he suggested.

So I did. The corporation's double-decker buses were running and, if the shops were shut, stallholders were open, and near Yassir Arafat Street, men had gathered in cheap tea-houses to discuss the war. I went off to buy fruit, and the shopkeeper didn't stop counting my dinars—all 11,500 of them—when a low-flying American jet crossed the street and dropped its payload 1,000 metres away in an explosion that changed the air pressure in our ears. But every street corner had its clutch of militiamen, and when I reached the side of the Foreign Ministry on the western bank of the river upstream from the marines, an Iraqi artillery crew was firing a 120-mm gun at the Americans from the middle of a dual carriageway, its tongue of fire bright against the grey-black fog that was drifting over Baghdad.

Within an hour and a half, the Americans had moved up the southern waterfront and were in danger of overrunning the old Ministry of Information. Outside the Rashid Hotel, they opened fire on civilians and militiamen alike, blasting a passing motorcyclist onto the road and shooting at a Reuters photographer who escaped with only bullet holes in his car. All across Baghdad, hospitals were inundated with wounded, many of them women and children hit by fragments of cluster bombs. By dusk, the Americans were flying F-18s in close air support to the marines, so confident of their destruction of Iraq's anti-aircraft gunners that they could clearly be seen cruising the brown and grey skies in pairs over central Baghdad, turning lazily southwards and west while the cross-river shellfire continued.

At mid-afternoon, the Americans had located an ammunition dump on the western bank of the river not far from the presidential palace—one of three they occupied—and blew up the lot in a sheet of flame several hundred feet high. For hours afterwards, shells could be heard whizzing from the conflagration, sometimes exploding in the sky. Even as they did so, the Americans—clearly intending to enrage Saddam and his ministers—transmitted live pictures of their exploration of the Republican Palace on the banks of the Tigris, videotape that showed the presidential lavatory seat, Saddam's marble-walled bathroom and gold-plated taps and chandeliers, and Special Forces soldiers sun-bathing—though there was no sun—on the presidential lawn.

As night fell, I came across a small rampart of concrete at the eastern end of the great Rashid Bridge over the Tigris. Its three Iraqi defenders had propped their Soviet-made rocket-propelled grenade launchers neatly in line along the top of the parapet. Hundreds of American tanks and armoured vehicles were pouring towards the Tigris from the south-west of Baghdad and these three Iraqis—two Baathist militiaman and a policeman—were standing there ready to defend the eastern shore from the greatest army ever known to man. That in itself, I thought, said something about both the courage and the hopelessness of the Arabs. The pain was still to come.

IT WAS A SCENE FROM THE CRIMEAN WAR, a hospital of screaming wounded and floors running with blood. I stepped in the stuff, it stuck to my shoes, to the clothes of all the doctors in the packed emergency room, it swamped the passageways and the blankets and sheets. The Iraqi civilians and soldiers brought to the Adnan Khairallah Martyr Hospital in the last hours of Saddam's regime—sometimes still clinging to severed limbs—are the dark side of victory and defeat, final proof, like the dead who are buried within hours, that war is indeed about the total failure of the human spirit.

As I wandered amid the beds and the groaning men and women on them— Dante's visit to the circles of Hell should have included these visions—the same old questions recurred. Was this for September 11th? For human rights? For weapons of mass destruction? In a jammed corridor, I came across a middle-aged man on a soaked hospital trolley. He had a head wound that was almost indescribable. From his right eye socket, hung a handkerchief that was streaming blood on to the floor. A little girl lay on a filthy bed, one leg broken, the other so badly gouged out by shrapnel during an American air attack that the only way doctors could prevent her moving it was to tie her foot to a rope weighed down with concrete blocks. Her name was Rawa Sabri.

And as I walked through this place of horror, the American shelling began to bracket the Tigris River outside, bringing back to the wounded the terror of death they had suffered only hours before. The road bridge I had just crossed to reach the hospital came under fire and clouds of cordite smoke drifted over the medical centre. Tremendous explosions shook the wards and corridors as doctors pushed shrieking children away from the windows.

Florence Nightingale never reached this part of the old Ottoman empire. But her equivalent is Dr. Khaldoun al-Baeri, the director and chief surgeon, a gently-spoken man who has slept an hour a day for six days and who is trying to save the lives of more than a hundred souls a day with one generator and half his operating theatres out of use—you cannot carry patients in your arms to the sixteenth floor when they are coughing blood. Dr. al-Baeri speaks like a sleepwalker, trying to describe how difficult it is to stop a wounded man or woman from suffocating when they have been injured in the thorax, explaining that after four operations to extract metal from the brains of his patients, he is almost too tired to think, let alone in English.