Yellow police boats sped over the muddy brown waters of the Tigris. Soldiers fired machine guns into clumps of reeds in a futile hunt for what they thought was a downed American pilot. A band played patriotic tunes, and for an afternoon at least a battered city was ready to believe that truly it could win this war.
Overhead, the skies glowered with the thick black smoke from dozens of burning pits of oil. Saddam Hussein’s palaces are in ruins. His most senior aides are rumoured to have been injured or killed. Entire avenues are carpeted in broken glass. The city’s air defence system is so discombobulated that it now sounds the all-clear signal only minutes before the US planes roar overhead.
But down by the river, they were transfixed for hours with a bizarre treasure hunt.
Nobody knew where the rumour of the downed US pilots started, or why they would be landing in broad daylight in the most heavily populated neighbourhood of Baghdad. But the most popular version of the tale involved a US fighter plane downed by Iraqi anti-aircraft gunners, with one pilot in captivity and a second running for his life along the banks of the river.
On Rashid bridge, one of the principal spans across the river, hundreds of motorists abandoned their cars and craned their necks over the railings, gawking at the action below. Others scampered down to the river bed to give chase.
Two police boats and a rackety blue craft with an outboard motor zipped up and down the river. Soldiers ran from one clump of reeds to another, chanting: ”Allah o Akbar” as they raked the reeds with gunfire.
At the Iraqi Union of Artists, next to the complex of security buildings that have borne the brunt of the American bombing, a band struck up, and people bobbed along to the music.
”Of course, I didn’t actually see the pilot,” said a landscape painter at the Iraqi Artists’ Union party. ”But I am sure he is there. I believe the parachutes were bluey-green.”
But plenty remained to boost morale yesterday, aside from the prospect of the 50m dinar, or $17 000, reward that Saddam Hussein has offered for the capture of a US pilot. Downing a US war plane is worth double — 100-million dinars — and the going rate for the capture of a US missile is 25-million.
After four days and nights of bombing in Baghdad, and television pictures of American tanks racing across the desert, the US and British forces appeared to have become bogged down, with unexpectedly heavy resistance in the southern towns of Umm Qasr, Basra, and Nassiriya.
Baghdad too has shown it is unwilling to roll over for the invaders. On Saturday, troops set fire to pits of crude oil that were dug around the town. By yesterday afternoon, 16 columns of thick black smoke spewed out of an arc on the eastern perimeters of the city. Baghdad was choking, but it had its nerve back.
Although last night’s bombing got under way by 9pm, and with a series of percussive thuds more intense than the night before, the majority of Baghdadis now sense a predictability in the US campaign. Although Saddam Hussein’s palaces, and military installations, are facing obliteration, their lives have been relatively unaffected.
Electricity and telephone lines function throughout the city, and a few shops and restaurants have reopened for business. People are beginning to gain the confidence to hang on.
”The first day of the war, I thought it is not going to last more than three days. Now it is the fourth day, and I wonder: ‘Is it going to last one month or two months?” said a woman in a well-to-do neighbourhood of the city.
In the morning, the Iraqi vice-president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, surfaced for a rare press conference, refuting US and British reports that he was injured or dead.
By afternoon, Iraqi television was airing pictures of the bodies of US soldiers, some with horrific injuries, lying in a heap in a building. A medical orderly flipped one over, and then grinned for the cameras.
By the time Iraqi television beamed pictures of five gulping and terrified US prisoners of war, officials were almost exultant.
”The American and British forces have not been able to expand their line,” Iraq’s defence minister, Sultan Hashim Ahmed, told a press conference. Beside him, Iraqi government officials were the calmest they have seemed in days.
As an aide pointed to pink neon stickers on an over-sized map of Iraq, the general painted a picture of US and British paralysis, with troops meeting stiff resistance from the regular army as well as tribesmen in the port of Umm Qasr, Basra, and Nassiriya.
He totted up an impressive tally of destroyed US tanks, armoured personnel carriers and helicopters. ”All the American and British forces couldn’t overwhelm one small battalion that is in Umm Qasr,” he said.
For ordinary Iraqis, whose sources of information are limited to state-controlled television and short-wave radio, claims that the US advance has stalled are entirely credible.
For days now, Iraqi television has been beaming pictures of tribesmen in flowing robes brandishing their weapons, as well as the staple images of Saddam Hussein kissing babies, and poets singing his praises.
Some people in Baghdad now believe that the reports from the front — confirmed by US and British sources — will give Iraqis the courage to fight on, once the US forces begin their advance on the city.
”Normal people don’t understand that the Americans are just going around towns. They think the Americans are weak,” said a leading Iraqi film maker.
”The government has brainwashed them that they are coming here to invade Iraq, and it will be their country, not Iraq’s. That is why they are giving battle.” – Guardian Unlimited Â