Jubilation and fear alternated as Baghdadis celebrated and looted yesterday.Lara Marlowe witnessed an extraordinary day
From a distance, the US armoured column looked strangely like a camel caravan, edging down the Baghdad boulevard in the afternoon heat, stretching south as far as the eye could see. The M1-A1 Abrams battle tanks, armoured personnel carriers and Humvees were coated in dust, with backpacks and boxes of Meals Ready to Eat roped to the sides of the armour.
There seemed to be some indefinable connection between these Marines, exhausted but alert after their 12-hour journey, and the Arab tribesmen who had won praise from the now deposed dictator for shooting at helicopters with hunting rifles.
The Marines' imminent arrival was heralded with a festive mood in Yassir Arafat Street. An open-air restaurant served chicken schwarma sandwiches, while the solid, Sunni Muslim bourgeoisie watched from their balconies. Many of the women and children were venturing out of doors for the first time since the war started. Men standing on the pavement looked solemn, but most smiled and said they were happy when I asked them. One woman just gave me a dirty look, then turned back in to her building.
That was when I saw the first looter, a teenage boy in a grimy blue tracksuit pushing a medical x-ray machine down the pavement. A man emerged from a side street carrying clothes racks from a shop; most merchants have stored their goods elsewhere, and that was probably all he found.
"I am happy we got rid of the tyrant," said a man from the neighbourhood with whom I had grown acquainted. "But I'm worried about the rubbish people, who will come in the night to steal from us."
The "rubbish people" he referred to are Shi'ites, the majority in Iraq, who have suffered discrimination since Ottoman days. Saddam Hussein's regime oppressed them terribly, and now the Shi'ites want vengeance.
The fender on the minesweeper of the Abrams tank going by had "USMC" painted next to the Arab image of a heavily-made-up woman's eye. Until then, I hadn't been able to talk to the Marines, because they couldn't hear me. But a passing gunner pulled his helmet off to call to his comrade on the next vehicle.
"Where are you from?" I called to him, and he shouted back: "I'm from Texas, Ma'am." Sgt Adam Palacios, of 1st Tank Bravo Company, 1 Division of the US Marine Corps, was from George Bush's home state - how fitting.
How did it feel to be in Baghdad? "It feels great," he said. "I didn't expect people to be so happy."
In the past three weeks, the unit has seen combat in Basra and Nassiryah, cities where several dozen Marines were killed or taken prisoner.
Cpl Christian Rojas, from Georgia, stood guard in Sa'adoun Street, a toothbrush tucked into his chest webbing to clean his M-16. He looked younger than his 19 years and offered a banal account of what he will probably remember as the most momentous days of his life. "We've just been clearing," he said.
What did he mean by "clearing"?
"Firing tank shells and heavy machine-guns." At buildings or people? "At people," he answered in a neutral tone.
What kind of people? "Some were civilians. Some were in uniform. Most of them surrendered," he said. I assume that by "civilians" Sgt Rojas meant militiamen in civilian clothing. Being in Baghdad was "cool", he added.
"We got up at 5 a.m.," Sgt Bartholomew Bochenski, from Connecticut, told me. "We were about five miles south of the city. We didn't know we were coming in today. Then we started seeing big buildings, and I kept hearing stuff on the radio about securing the Palestine Hotel."
Was he worried that Iraqis might hate the US for the civilian casualties they've suffered? "It goes through my mind once in a while," Sgt Bochenski admitted. "But this is war."
The same sentence - "This is war" - was the standard excuse of the Iraqi Information Ministry director each time Iraq did something bad.
As I walked past a tank with the words "Kitten Rescue" painted on its barrel, a matron in a headscarf and her grey-haired husband, wearing an Arab galabiyeh, shuffled nervously along the pavement, cringeing as if they thought the tank would fire on them. They carried a few groceries in a plastic bag and kept as close as they could to the wall. The woman shook a white cloth over her head the whole time, and when they cleared the street corner, the old couple ran to their apartment building.
The Marines' arrival at the Palestine Hotel, in the heart of residential east Baghad, upstaged their taking of the main presidential complex across the Tigris two days earlier, because it signified the final collapse of government authority.
And the presence of hundreds of journalists provided a direct line to world television screens.
A crowd was gathering in the adjacent square, dominated by a huge statue of Saddam Hussein, holding his right hand aloft in the manner of Kim Il-Sung.
First a young man tore off the brass plaque bearing the president's name and the date of his inauguration. Another took a sledge-hammer to the base. Others arrived with a ladder, to hang a noose-like rope around the neck of the effigy. But the crowd should have reckoned with the stubborness of the dictator. He built his statues as he built his palaces and bunkers: to last. At one point, the young men grew frustrated with their failure to topple the statue and covered its head with a US flag. It would take hours - and the help of a US armoured personnel carrier - to finally topple the likeness so that Iraqis could trample on its head.
While all this was going on, Mustafa Abdullah (47) approached me and pointed to his shoes. "Jacques Chirac, Jacques Chirac," he kept saying, lifting first one foot, then the other, to point at the soles. Poor Jacques Chirac - like the "human shields" and the "Arab volunteers" now under the Marines' protection to prevent Iraqis from lynching them - the French president defended what he thought was a just cause. Mixing his French metaphors, Mr Abdullah told me that April 9th was the Iraqi taking of the Bastille, the new equivalent of July 14th, 1789.
What was his profession? "Official," he replied. He worked for the government and he was celebrating the collapse of the regime? Yes, he said. He was very happy. Like hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, perhaps millions, Mr Abdullah will no doubt be rehabilitated, "de-Saddamised".
It will take time - or the proven arrest or death of Saddam Hussein - for Iraqis to believe that his rule is really over. I asked one happy man in Sa'adoun Street where he thought Saddam had gone. "Maybe he is dead, or he escaped to Mosul. Many army people come from Mosul, and they love him." The Russian embassy in Mansur was another rumoured destination, along with Saddam's home town of Tikrit.
In days to come, phenomena like the unexplained fire which blazed in north Bagdad last night, shooting thousand-foot flames on to the dark skyline, will inevitably evoke the fate of the Iraqi dictator.
US military officials said that the looters who descended like vultures on downtown Baghdad were "just letting off steam". The looters stole a television camera, and the cameraman's money, and threatened to shoot this correspondent when I tried to enter a ministry they were sacking.
Returning to the Palestine Hotel, I asked my taxi-driver to drop me a block away from the Marines so that they wouldn't open fire on his battered old car. To my surprise, there were still more looters, dragging a coffee-table, transistor radio and coat-trees out of the Culture Ministry. At the Oil Ministry, the thieves despaired of starting the minister's Mercedes, so they stole its tyres and upholstered seats, stripping it down to a skeleton.
A US Marine corporal could see the looting of the Culture Ministry from Ferdoos Square, but it didn't seem to bother him. A Shi'ite family carried an air-conditioning unit out of another building. Were these apartments? "No," the father replied, "mokhabarat" (the intelligence service). No wonder there was no sign on the building.
The inhabitants of Zaim Street stood in their gardens, watching the plunder on either side. A few doors down, a woman with tears in her eyes spoke to me from her doorway. "This is not good," she said. "The war has been awful." She nodded first towards the US Humvee, then at the looters. "The Americans are down the street and look what these people are doing."
The Marine corporal watching the looting was Kevin Bird, from Tennessee. "We didn't expect to be here so quickly," he said. I asked him how he thought Iraqis saw US forces. "They seem strangely comfortable," he replied.
But, as I walked up the hotel drive, I passed a Yugoslav Reuters photographer whom I knew from the 1999 war. One of his close friends was killed and two others wounded in the US attack on the hotel on Tuesday, and the photographer looked devastated. By chance, a woman from al Jazeera, whose correspondent was killed in a rocket attack on the same day, sat crying nearby.
Indoors, the Palestine's manager was pleading with Marine officers to protect his hotel. He'd obligingly used his master key to let them search all the rooms used by the Iraqi Ministry of Information.
Protecting the journalists that another Marine unit had attacked the day before was not unlike the challenge facing the US throughout the country. Winning the confidence of people you've bombed isn't easy. But keeping peace between Iraqis could be even harder.