Eyewitness (49 page)

Despite the US threats, we were still drawn back to the al-Rashid. We vainly attempted to ginger the staff into understanding their predicament. We stopped for lunch – the kebabs and Iraqi bread were good, and the freshly squeezed orange juice satisfied a particular need for the health-conscious Burns. While the al-Rashid was a good distance from the Palestine, our minders allowed us to go there unaccompanied, so we had an opportunity to observe the impact of the US-led bombing without the hand of a minder on our shoulders.

But as we finished lunch, there was gut-wrenching news from the north – Paul Moran, a freelance cameraman working for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, had died in a suicide-bomb attack at Gerdigo, near Halabja. ABC correspondent Eric Campbell was also injured when a man near a Kurdish militia checkpoint in north-eastern Iraq summoned him and Moran, and then detonated a car.

Gerdigo was a small town that had been occupied by units of Ansar al-Islam, a terrorist group said to include remnants of al-Qaeda, which had fled Afghanistan to the wilds of northern Iraq. Hundreds of journalists had poured into Kurdistan to cover the long-expected US push on Baghdad from the north – a plan which fell away when Turkey refused to allow US troops access to northern Iraq through Turkish territory. Witnesses said that the ABC crew had been with other foreign journalists on the outskirts of Gerdigo, interviewing people fleeing in the wake of a US cruise missile bombardment that had begun last night. Moran was still filming, but most of the other journalists had just left the scene when the explosion occurred.

I knew first-hand how dangerous this part of the world was. In November 2002 I had ventured into Iraqi Kurdistan to write a fourpart series, partly about the victims of Saddam’s running campaign of death and deprivation against the Kurds and partly about the Ansar al-Islam, as I tried to piece together what links there might be between them and Osama bin Laden’s men. In Sulaymaniyah the atmosphere had literally choked you with fear. No journalist could go out unaccompanied and most got out of the area as quickly as they could.

We all felt stunned. This was the first journalist killed in the war – and we knew there’d be more. We paid the bill quickly and returned to the Palestine. Already we were suffering from a bewildering combination of not enough sleep and a near-overpowering sense of what-might- happen-now? If last night had been the curtain raiser to ‘Shock and Awe’, what could we expect tonight?

Filed Monday, April 7th, at 4.29 p.m., Sheraton Hotel.
At precisely 8 a.m. explosions in the four elaborate gatehouses of Saddam Hussein’s presidential compound, once the nerve centre of his reeling regime, signal the start of a powerful American push into the heart of Baghdad.

Minutes later, US missile attacks on the imposing sandstone Republican Palace, nestled deep in the compound’s manicured and date-palmed gardens, send huge sprays of debris and smoke into the sky. Intense mortar and machine-gun fire erupts up and down the three-kilometre-long compound, which runs along the west bank of the Tigris River, from the green-railed Jumhuriyah Bridge to the cableslung July 14th river crossing.

Throughout the night it seemed that advance parties of US special operations were moving around in the compound, preparing for today’s assault. I watched throughout the night as flashes of light mingled with sporadic exchanges of gun-fire and heavy, intermittent explosions.

At first, the Iraqi forces put up a strong fight against a 130-vehicle column of Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles that rumbled in from the Saddam International Airport, negotiating an Iraq minefield that had been newly laid in the early hours. F-16 fighters and ‘tankbuster’ aircraft flew ahead of them, bombing Iraqi tanks and positions that dared to challenge their advance into the capital.

But, as I watch from the 12th floor of the Sheraton Hotel, directly across the river, a group of vehicles that has broken away from the US column moves in from the south, prompting many of the Iraqi defenders to flee. Under incessant American fire – machine-guns, mortars and small missiles – the Iraqis run from two directions, pouring out of the centre of the compound and from a heavily armed sand spit that intrudes into the Tigris, before bolting north along an access road that services the dozens of buildings within the fortified complex.

These are supposed to be the fearless Republican Guards but under fire there is no bravery and little dignity as many of them abandon their posts, some of them struggling to strip to their underwear as they flee, hoping that half-naked they will not be identified as members of Saddam’s crack force. When they are confronted with a security fence that extends into the river they are so desperate to get away that they jump in, swimming 50 metres out from the bank before returning along the opposite side of the fence to pick up the access road again.

Shells erupt in the islands of bulrushes in the river and bullets skim on the water as the fighting takes on the sound and fury of a discordant, explosive symphony. Prayers are sung from mosque minarets and an ammunition dump explodes spectacularly as some of the remaining Iraqi fighters ignite pre-prepared trenches of oil – filling the air with thick black smoke that never gives them the cover they are seeking.

But those who are pinned down on the spit do not have a chance. They come under heavy bombardment from the Bradley vehicles. After an hour, US infantrymen emerge from the vehicles, crouch in their shadow and pick off the remaining guards one by one.

I can hear fighting from all directions within the dense foliage of the presidential compound. When Iraqi snipers appear on top of a clock tower to the west of the compound, it is demolished by American tank fire.

But the high-tech of this war is not confined to weapons. In a satellite phone call from New York, I’m told that Fox News in the US is running live footage from the steps of the Republican Palace – just across the river from me – of an American commander waving his University of Georgia flag and declaring that he is going inside to have a shower in one of Saddam’s gold-plated bathrooms.

The funereal bass-drum boom of very heavy artillery and tank fire is coming from around the city, and I can hear the spitting sound of outgoing surface-to-air missiles as US Warthogs and unmanned drones flying low in a hazy sky provide cover for the US fighters.

But, even as this is happening, the Iraqi Information Minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, bounces into the Palestine Hotel to deny it all. Agitation is starting to show behind his customary jokey manner; with the noise of the fighting interrupting him, he abandons his practice of formal press briefings in a dim hotel conference room and instead addresses a knot of reporters and cameras on the hotel’s rooftop terrace.

Mr al-Sahhaf insists that the Iraqis ‘slaughtered three-quarters’ of the US forces at Saddam International Airport the previous evening and that American claims that they have encircled the city are ‘a part of their sickness’. Before dashing away in great haste, there is another spasm of hyperbole: ‘Be assured that Baghdad is secure and the city’s heroic civilian population will keep it that way. I have just come from the al-Rashid Hotel – where the mercenaries say they have us surrounded – and there are only civilian Iraqis with machine-guns in the lobbies. The Americans are beginning to commit suicide at the walls of Baghdad! They tried to come in with two armoured personnel carriers this morning, but we besieged them and killed them all.’

The morning weather has been still but suddenly a wild wind blows up, ripping maps from the wall of my room and dragging the smoke plumes through a full 360 degrees in a matter of minutes, before settling the smoke like a theatre curtain between the Sheraton and Saddam’s compound. There are loud explosions around the hotel – possibly from a multiple rocket launcher I saw pulling into a sidestreet earlier. It seems that fighting has broken out on the east bank of the river – civilian Iraqis tell me that during the night paratroopers dropped into the area and later I hear that a palace on this side of the river is also under US attack.

I’m distracted by a fracas on the riverfront below my balcony. A TV crew, which has been filming the fighting from the east bank, is being hauled away by angry Iraqi soldiers. Officials from the Information Ministry and the soldiers play tug-of-war with a screaming cameraman and they manage to drag him back to the hotel, a much better outcome than the prison where the soldiers are likely to have dumped him.

Saddam seems to be desperate. The opening battle for Baghdad is underway and he has one of his associates on State TV and radio offering cash incentives to his defence forces in a bid to hold his army together – 15 million dinars (about $A15,000) for any fighter who destroys an allied tank, armoured personnel carrier or artillery piece. Also Information Minister al-Sahhaf is back on the airwaves, seeming to threaten any Iraqi who does not take up arms – he says that they should all be in the streets and that those who do not shoot at the Americans would be ‘cursed’.

When I finally get out into the streets, the atmosphere is bizarre. There is fighting to the east and to the west, but on the main commercial strip on Saadoun Street some stubborn traders insist on opening for business. The Information Ministry puts on a bus, to show us that all is normal in Baghdad. Yet this is not the case. The relentless shoeshine boys are still out and about, but the Princess of Legs boutique is shuttered, like most other businesses.

However, a businessman, carrying a leather briefcase with gold fittings on the corners, is walking purposefully on the pavement and a man in traditional dress emerges from a chicken shop with a bag under his arm as though this is just another day in Baghdad. A cigarette hawker – selling by the packet or individually – defiantly sits at his card table on a street corner and customers are banked up at a service station.

But the sand-bagged positions that have been manned for weeks are abandoned and the soldiers who have been loitering in side-streets are gone. Presumably they have been sent to fight or they have done a runner. The guards have gone from the Trade and Foreign ministries. Despite US claims that they had circled the Information Ministry, only Iraqi guards are on duty and Iraqi bureaucrats can be seen going to and from the bombed-out building.

The ministry denies that the Americans have surrounded the al- Rashid Hotel but, rather than allow us to see for ourselves, its minders route the press bus back to the Palestine and Sheraton hotels instead of driving an extra two or three city blocks to the al-Rashid. Traffic is light, but Iraqis are still fleeing Baghdad; some of them are reduced to getting away from the city on donkey-drawn carts.

I worry about the commander and his shower. The fighting has been going on now for seven hours and there are still massive explosions and the crackle of machine-gun exchanges coming from the palace. The Iraqis are blasting the compound with surface-to-surface missiles and mortars: the Americans are hitting it with missiles and, clearly, this is not the right time for a shower.

But I’m more worried about Sabah, one of our drivers. He would not listen, and now he’s out in all of this, insisting that he must fetch lunch for us.

*

Filed Thursday, April 8th, at 2.24 p.m.
Looking deep into the Baghdad blackout, I can see the tiniest point of red light. But this light casts a beam that is as enormous as it is confronting. It’s on the levee wall that stops the Tigris River from flooding into what was Saddam Hussein’s presidential compound. Tonight this sprawling complex is the forward base for the US thrust into Iraq and the red light marks the bivouac of a US infantry unit.

But the turbid waters of the Tigris separate more than the US soldiers and me. I’m on the east side of the city, just back in my room at the Sheraton Hotel after a dash at breakneck speed to the middle-class suburb of Mansur. With missiles still falling on the city our drivers are going berserk – fast and dangerous is the only speed they know.

Along the way I could see that most of the armed Iraqi men who were previously behind sand-bags, guarding government buildings, are gone. The Foreign Ministry, the Information Ministry and the Planning Ministry stand naked to US attacks.

But there is still one guard near the inter-city bus station, and he seems to be there for the long haul. He cradles a grenade launcher as he sits by his pavement post in a brown, crushed-velvet armchair.

There are signs of the morning’s progress through the city of the US armoured column that took the presidential compound – the road near the bus station is cratered, the station’s perimeter wall has been blasted, and an incinerated police car lies off to the side of the road.

On Saadoun Street a man dressed in black jeans, a black opennecked shirt and a black leather vest approaches and tells me: ‘3000 today.’ I think he is talking about the war’s death toll, but it turns out that he’s a currency dealer, offering 3000 Iraqi dinars to the US dollar.

We speed past al-Zawra Park – where Iraqi forces are hiding cannons and truckloads of ammunition in the shadow of the gum trees – and past another public garden, in which there are convulsions as four Iraqi surface-to-surface missiles streak westwards towards the setting sun. Then we lurch around a traffic island adorned with a jowly bust of the Caliph al-Mansur.

It was Abu Jafar al-Mansur who built the ancient round city of Baghdad in 762 AD. He had traits in common with today’s leader – he had an edifice complex and he was security-paranoid. But not even he could have had the high-powered, high-tech US Third Infantry in mind when he mused, as he did centuries ago, about how the Tigris River trade route would bring the world to a city that had yet to become the setting for the tales of
The Thousand and One Nights
– Sinbad, Ali Baba and Aladdin.

I’ve broken away from observing the battle for the presidential compound to look at a gaping hole in the ground in Mansur. But it is the second visit of the day to this neighbourhood for the silver-haired Sabah, who is more than a driver to us. Earlier, Sabah had walked out of Mansur’s al-Saah Restaurant with our take-away lunch only minutes before a huge explosion made shards of its plate-glass windows, lacerating customers and freaking the neighbourhood. But that is nothing compared to the real damage a block away. Four or five houses have literally disappeared and in their place is a crater that is maybe 30 to 40 metres in diameter and 15 to 20 metres deep.