Baghdad Empties, but Fills With Foreboding
By JOHN F. BURNS
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 25 — It was a grim day today in Baghdad, perhaps the grimmest yet since the war began, and with the darkening prospect of worse to come.
Not long past noon, the Iraqi capital was nearly dark, its streets nearly deserted for miles on end. Since Saturday, the city has been shrouded by huge, roiling clouds of black smoke from oil trenches Saddam Hussein's forces have set afire around the outer districts in hopes of foiling guidance systems on American aircraft and bombs. Then, overnight, a storm blew in from the desert, said to be the worst in years, blasting everything with howling winds that bent the date palms along the Tigris River almost flat, and bringing with it a thick screen of yellowish-brown sand.
Away to the southwest, as close to Baghdad as 50 miles in some places, advance units of the United States' Army's Third Infantry Division were probing through the choking dust. Further back, the 101st Airborne Division was moving north on a separate track. With shortwave radios and the word-of-mouth networks that keep Iraqis informed of realities their rulers would deny them, there was a hardly a man or woman in Baghdad, or even a child over 7 or 8 for that matter, who did not know that the Americans were almost at the city's gates.
And that knowledge, in many ways, was the hardest thing of all.
For 30 years, Mr. Hussein has worked to make himself unchallengeable in Iraq. The war with Iran, the occupation of Kuwait, United Nations economic sanctions, the squaring off against America, the relentless purges of all potential challengers and critics, the astonishing hagiography of the monuments, the statues, the biographies, the adoring songs — all have been, as many Iraqis see it, an outgrowth of the drive of an impoverished, fatherless, barefoot boy from a village on the Tigris to become, as official Iraqi publications describe him, Saddam the Great.
But in the days since American forces crossed the border from Kuwait, and especially now that they are in the early stages of mounting a siege of Baghdad, Mr. Hussein has been confronted with the worst nightmare any absolute ruler can confront — a physical force greater than his own.
Even Iraqi loyalists, at least at the level of common men and women, say privately that, this time, the long years may be up. But they, and other Iraqis who do not support Mr. Hussein, have found themselves in something like an accord in recent days over the nightmare than could lie ahead.
In one family today, among professional, middle-class people who have long yearned for a freer Iraq unburdened by sanctions and repression, there was one obsessive concern. It was similar to the one that mesmerized this and similar families after President Bush gave Mr. Hussein and his two sons an ultimatum last week to quit Iraq within 48 hours, or face war.
Then, it was how long Iraqis had to wait for the first American airstrikes and the ground assault from Kuwait. Today, with the invaders more than 300 miles closer to Baghdad, the question was the same: How long would America take to close its account with Mr. Hussein?
The family members, fearful of being described in any way that could make them identifiable, said that they were scared to death by the success that Iraqi irregular troops, among them the most fanatical of his zealots, have had in delaying and harassing the American troops on their drive up the Euphrates River valley.
If similar groups make a fight for Baghdad, as most Iraqis believe they will, the family said, the new freedoms they had hoped to celebrate could come at too high a price in shattered Iraqi lives.
Only a week ago, two of the three grown men in the family were eager for the United States to act against Mr. Hussein. The third, still a university student, hoped for a free Iraq, but leaned toward rejecting the Faustian deal, as he saw it, that Iraqis would be making in taking their liberty from America, with its record elsewhere in the Middle East, especially its tilting toward Israel in the conflict with the Palestinians.
But today, the three were done with their quarreling, in the face of anxieties over the civil war that could break out in Baghdad if the American siege is protracted.
Hearing from the Voice of America and the BBC's shortwave broadcasts of American generals' cautious plans for moving into Baghdad, the family members said they were worried about the possibility of violent retribution against people like themselves, people with Western educations and relatives in America, if the progress toward the American capture of Baghdad was slow.
But much more than that, they said, they feared what might befall Iraqis like themselves if, faced with continued stiff resistance by Mr. Hussein's troops, Mr. Bush did what his father did at the end of the Persian Gulf war in 1991, and decided that a settlement was preferable to a long and grisly campaign to topple Mr. Hussein.
"That is our nightmare," one of the men said, "and we ask, `What will Mr. Bush do to help us then?' "
Even before the war, Iraqis had begun to borrow from an imagined future, speaking out, here and there, as though new freedoms had already arrived. After the conflict started, this continued for a few days, encouraged by the fact that Mr. Hussein had disappeared from view after the American attempt to kill him with the cruise missile attack that began the war before dawn on Thursday. But then, on Monday, he reappeared with a lengthy television speech calling for Iraqi militiamen to "cut the throats" of the Americans, and the old anxieties were back in full measure, all over town.
This, amid the gloom of the sandstorm and the clouds of thick black smoke, was another reason Baghdad's spirits were at a low ebb today.
One striking aspect of the city was how little government Iraq has left, at least in terms of ministries that can deliver the services people need. Mr. Hussein's Iraq has been the nearest thing in the Middle East to a totalitarian state, controlling every aspect of its citizens' lives through a network of overlapping security agencies for which Mr. Hussein found his template in Stalin's Russia.
Near the end, however, if this is indeed the end, the government seems to be disappearing, leaving citizens, at their hour of crisis, to fend for themselves.
After the heavy bombing attacks of Friday night turned much of the government quarter of central Baghdad into an inferno, whole ministries were abandoned. The few that were not abandoned emptied rapidly today after a formal warning the Pentagon gave Western news organizations, saying reporters in the Iraqi capital should "not go near any military assets or buildings that are used by the Iraqi government."
Word of this quickly spread, persuading people working in the Information Ministry, among others, that staying at their posts might expose them to fresh American air attacks.
If it is a conundrum how Mr. Hussein has maintained his power in a capital where the government appears to have just about shut down, the answer lies in the pattern that American troops ran into on their drive north from Kuwait.
Although the Iraqi leader has always had iron control of the government and the army, the heart of his power has lain outside the formal institutions of the state, and especially in the shadowy network of irregular militia units and security agencies that report to members of his family. It is those elements that have now become crucial to sustaining his power.
In the neighborhoods of Baghdad, Iraqis have been observing for weeks the dispersal of those militias with strong personal loyalties to Mr. Hussein. Heavily armed, and often traveling in white pickup trucks, those men — from the militia formations of the ruling Baath Party, from fanatical groups of fedayeen, or martyrs for God, who wear black coveralls and black face masks, and from the private armies of tribal leaders who have sworn fealty to Mr. Hussein — are likely to be among the last groups to desert him, Iraqis say. For similar reasons, they have been the shock troops of the Iraqi leader's resistance, so far, to the American troops advancing from the south.
Mr. Hussein, of course, remains the focal point of much of the government activity that is left. At the Information Ministry, hours after the Pentagon's warning about possible American air attacks on all government buildings, lower-level staff members were busy translating, photocopying and stapling texts of Mr. Hussein's televised address on Monday, and a message he sent today to the fedayeen.
At nightfall, some of the government minders assigned to reporters were still in the huge building, watching Iraqi television's coverage of the war. Some seemed fearful, and one asked an American reporter if he would be safe staying in the building until the end of his shift at 10 p.m.
Outside the ministry, the deserted streets were made more eerie still, after dark, by the squat, brooding shapes of the apartment blocks built to house many government officials. They, too, appeared to be mostly empty, apparently closed up and locked by families who had fled to the suburbs, or to homes in towns and villages outside Baghdad. On a drive through the area, the only face visible for blocks on end was Mr. Hussein's, on the wall posters and billboards that are the ubiquitous adornment of Baghdad.
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