"Am-ri-ka! Am-ri-ka! Am-ri-ka!" After suffering years of Saddam's ethnic cleansing and a night of U.S. bombing, the residents of Mahad greet Americans with chants and stories and shouts of joy.
April 9, 2003 | MAHAD, Iraq -- As the afternoon light filtered through the haze and dust, Zedu, an old Kurdish man born in the village of Kandala, resettled by Saddam Hussein's regime in the bleak town of Mahad, leaned on his shepherd's crook and wept. He was crying tears of relief and joy and he was not alone.
Zedu and thousands of other people in Mahad waited 28 years for Sunday, April 6, the day their town was abandoned by the Iraqi regime under pressure from U.S. forces. Leaving a relieved but still nervous population behind, the Iraqi military had fled a night of intense bombing by U.S. aircraft, retreating to the safety of a ridge above the town. People in Mahad were terrified that the Iraqis would shell them in an act of retribution. After a few anxious hours, the village elders made contact with the local authorities from Kurdistan and invited them to come into the town and take control. It was a day of song and stories and joy, when the bombing and death that made it all possible seemed blessedly far away.
Mahad, desperately poor, is a place of open sewers and crumbling cinderblock buildings, more reminiscent of rural Afghanistan than Iraq. It was created almost 30 years ago, when Saddam Hussein's vengeful administration deprived the residents of nine villages of their farms -- Kurdish ethnic cleansing -- and forced them into a refugee camp, which eventually became the makeshift town of Mahad. Arabs brought in by the government took over the expropriated Kurdish farms, in some cases renting the land back to their original owners.
I witnessed Mahad's liberation by happy accident, after trying to cover a battle some distance to the north and getting lost.
"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despiceable an ignoreable war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder." -- Albert Einstein
I can't be sure that Einstein said this, but I have found several websites that have some variation of this quote.
Civilian death toll horrific: priest April 08, 2003
THE accuracy of United States' bombs and missiles is as overrated as it was in the Gulf War and is taking a horrific toll on Iraqi civilians, according to a Perth clergyman in Baghdad.
In the first email to his Perth family in over a week, the Reverend Neville Watson, one of 12 so-called Peace Team members still in Iraq, said Baghdad hospitals were strewn with the mutilated corpses of civilians.
"Corpses, horribly mutilated by blast and fire, litter the hospital corridors, while dismembered and badly injured children lie in beds," Mr Watson said.
"Distraught mothers identify their children in the morgue, and death and destruction are everywhere to be found."
Iraqi authorities have curbed foreigners' communications so the email was taken on a disc to Jordan from where it was emailed to the Peace Team's US headquarters and finally sent overnight to the Watson family.
Iraqi military death toll a battlefield mystery Deb Reichmann, Associated Press
Published April 9, 2003 SOLD09
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The death toll of Iraqi soldiers is in the thousands, but precisely how many have died is anyone's guess.
The Pentagon isn't doing estimates. The International Committee of the Red Cross says hospitals in Baghdad, which are running out of drugs and anesthetics, are too busy to count the wounded.
Military analysts are divided: One says more than 10,000 uniformed Iraqi soldiers will be dead at war's end. Another suggests the death toll will be half that. Others won't venture a guess.
"These are extremely rubber numbers," said Dana Dillon, a senior analyst and retired Army major at the Heritage Foundation. "It's difficult to verify, especially when you're dropping bombs on people and you don't go back and count bodies."
Adding to the confusion are claims by Iraq's minister of information, Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, who says U.S. and British soldiers are the ones being killed. They're so demoralized, he said, that they're "beginning to commit suicide." On Tuesday, he said the coalition forces "will be burnt."
U.S. and British military officials are keeping close track of coalition casualties: 96 U.S. troops have died in the war, according to the Pentagon, and 30 British troops, according to the British government. But most information about Iraqi troop casualties has dribbled out, usually after individual fights or suicide bombings.
For instance, Capt. Philip Wolford, a company commander with the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, estimated Tuesday that at least 50 Iraqi fighters were killed when Iraq sent buses and trucks full of fighters across the Tigris River in an attempt to overrun U.S. forces holding a strategic intersection on the western side of Baghdad.
Col. David Perkins of the 3rd Infantry said about 500 Iraqi forces took part in the counterattack. They were a combination of special Republican Guard, Fedayeen and Baath Party loyalists -- "a lot of civilian-dressed fighters," he said.
That assault on Baghdad followed weekend incursions into the capital, a show of force that the Pentagon says left 2,000 to 3,000 Iraqi fighters dead.
"It's a pure guesstimate," said Dan Goure, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute. He said the Pentagon issued the number to convince Iraqi fighters that the battle is lopsided and they should put down their weapons.
Before the war began, government officials and independent military think tanks estimated Iraq had 389,000 full-time, active-duty military, including about 80,000 members of the Republican Guard. Iraq also was believed to have 650,000 reserve troops and 44,000 to 60,000 members of paramilitary and security forces.
Death, fear, grief at Baghdad bomb site -- but no sign of Saddam Anthony Shadid, Washington Post
Published April 9, 2003 MANS09
BAGHDAD -- Bulldozers rumbled over hills of rubble Tuesday in the wealthy neighborhood of Mansour. They lurched, careful not to fall into a 30-foot-deep crater. Relatives sobbed as they watched workers recover several dismembered and battered bodies of the 13 residents they said were buried in the ruins.
The target Monday of four 2,000-pound bombs was President Saddam Hussein, who was possibly hiding in one of the homes with his two sons, Udai and Qusai. U.S. officials have stopped short of claiming they killed the Iraqi leader, and the mystery may not be answered for some time.
No security forces were visible to witness the excavation: in a rapidly crumbling police state, the police were nowhere to be seen.
Whether or not Iraq's president survives, government authority receded across Baghdad Tuesday. There were scattered scenes of a functioning bureaucracy, most notably red, double-decked public buses that ran their routes, even during the most intense fighting Tuesday morning.
But more common were signs of collapse. Trash piled up on sidewalks, and streets were deserted. A few government officials managed a brave face, but they spoke only blocks away from U.S. tanks, and briefly.
Against the backdrop of artillery, tank rounds and gunfire, masses of civilians continued to flee, with miles of cars moving bumper-to-bumper along the snarled highway to the north. Much of the traffic moved past a banner fluttering outside Al-Nida Mosque that read, "Iraq will remain steadfast, victorious and lofty under the leadership of the leader, his excellency President Saddam Hussein."
Iraqi soldiers were still evident, though in fewer numbers. With rifles and grenades, they stood in bunches, wearing green khakis, desert camouflage, civilian clothes or a mixture. A handful of military vehicles moved through the streets, some with Republican Guard insignia, but the mobilization that the capital witnessed 48 hours ago was far less pronounced.
Many sandbagged positions were abandoned, and some of the oil fires that blanketed Baghdad in a black haze had gone out. Under the fifth day of a blackout, the lone commerce were shops displaying generators and suitcases.
In much of the capital, U.S. forces were the predominant military presence. U.S. soldiers occupied palaces and ministries, bridges and the Rashid Barracks. U.S. jets screamed overhead.
For the first time since the war started, Iraqi television went off the air for good. Gone was the diet of Saddam footage, patriotic music and nationalist poetry. Although Iraqi radio remained on the air, the government was left without its most effective means of propaganda, an instrument it fought dearly to keep operating.
As in past days, Information Minister Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf appeared before journalists at the Palestine Hotel. Like Monday, when he denied U.S. forces were in the city even as journalists asking questions could see them across the river, he predicted again Tuesday -- with no hint that events had challenged his conviction -- that U.S. soldiers would be defeated.
"Baghdad is bracing to pummel the invaders," he said.
But his remarks lasted just a few minutes, in contrast to the hourlong news conferences he held at the war's start. Other senior Iraqi officials, once paraded before journalists in meetings twice or three times a day, haven't been seen since last week.
The toll from the war overwhelmed Iraqi hospitals. At Al-Kindi Hospital, where many wounded civilians have been treated, 30 to 35 bodies arrived Tuesday and at least 300 wounded were admitted, said Taleb al-Saadi, an orthopedic surgeon. By late afternoon, he said he'd performed 12 surgeries, including two amputations, as hospitals struggled with shortages of equipment and anesthesia.
"They are hitting civilian houses, roads and cars," he said. "They are hitting everybody."
There were similarly desperate moments at Mansour, where the U.S. strike leveled several houses in an attempt to kill Saddam. The blasts spread destruction for blocks in a district that is home to government officials and many of the capital's diplomatic compounds. The Sa'a Restaurant, said to have been visited by Saddam on a tour of Mansour on Friday, was gutted. Steel support beams, doorknobs, and shattered furniture were thrown 200 yards away.
Along the crater, orange trees were uprooted and date palms were split like twigs. Not a window was left intact in the grocery stores, boutiques, travel agencies and electric appliance shops lining nearby Ramadan Avenue.
"Look at the area," said Hassan Amin, as he pointed to debris and chunks of rubble and masonry scattered in the streets. "Until now, I haven't heard an explosion like that. It was exactly like an earthquake."
Under the rubble
Some neighbors gazed at the crater. Others helped civilian workers try to recover the bodies.
At one point, a man called out, "They found something! They found something!" Neighbors ran to help. In the rubble was the torso of Lava Jamal, 20. A few feet away, they found what was left of her head, her brown hair matted with blood.
They put both in white blankets trimmed with blue and left them against a nearby wall, where flies soon gathered. Sitting in a chair down the road, her mother cried uncontrollably into her hands, and then vomited.
Less than an hour later, another scene unfolded. This time, there were no shouts. Atef Yusuf had found his nephew, Raad Hatem, 6. He lifted the boy's body, coated in a gray dust except for the gaping wound on the back of his head. For a few minutes, he swayed with the body, back and forth, wailing. Then he stumbled to another blanket and wrapped the boy's body inside.
"Is he a military leader?" he asked. "Are all these people military leaders?"
His eyes red, he went back to work. Still underneath the rubble were his six other nieces and nephews, he said.
