The orgy of looting engulfing the Iraqi capital spread yesterday to Western embassies and UN offices, as well as the homes of former high-ranking officials in Saddam Hussein's regime.
Shia families from Baghdad's poor suburbs cruised the streets, scouting for potential plunder, heading home in cars so loaded down they could barely move.
In anarchy which the Iraqis are themselves comparing to to French revolution, people stole fluorescent light fixtures, washing machines, even kitchen sinks. They raided the homes of the former deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz, Saddam Hussein's half-brother Watban and the man known as Chemical Ali, Hassan Majid, the perpetrator of the Halabja massacre, whom British forces claim to have killed in Basra.
Assad, a black stallion that belonged to Saddam's eldest son Uday, was led away from his stable by a man named Talal. I saw two handsome hunting spaniels, white with russet spots, running alongside a plunder lorry. One was tied with a leash, the other followed its mate.
"Those are Uday's dogs!" my taxi driver exclaimed. A video of the dictator's son, hunting with his dogs, had been broadcast many times on Iraqi television, and a poster of Uday and his canine chums hung outside a well-known bar until this week.
The Shias are venting their fury at the regime which oppressed them. At the German embassy - only 300 metres from US marine positions - looters rejected all signs of culture: a pile of classical records lay discarded in the courtyard. A woman in a chador dismantled a wood-and-glass bookcase with a screwdriver.
A mountain of books had been thrown into the centre of the German ambassador's office, so the looters could take the bookshelves. Internationals Recht und Diplomatie said one cover. A lovely landscape of trees by a river was also cast aside.
Working like feverish automatons, men, women and children walked out shouldering coffee tables, sofa cushions, desk drawers, trampling the German and EU flags underfoot. One man took apart the fuse box. An infant, perhaps two years-old, sat on the ground playing with the embassy's ink stamps and seals. A boy swung a crowbar at the bannister in the central staircase, taking a big chip out of it.
Outside in the boulevard, two boys held cloth bags brimming with German army uniforms with red, orange and black flashes on the shoulders. The Slovak embassy was also looted.
A few blocks away, Unicef, the UN agency that tirelessly denounced the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children after the imposition of UN sanctions, was treated as shabbily as the German embassy. Most of the house plants and office furniture had been carried out before I got there, and the floors and stairs were buried in thousands of sheaves of paper.
As the looters ebbed around me, I couldn't help smiling at one discarded report: Empowering the Poor, said the cover. Someone had dropped a photocopier going down the stairs, and the machine lay broken on its side, black ink powder spilling across the foyer. A small boy juggled boxes of sellotape and office supplies, straining to see over the top. The looters had no use for the UN's blue and white flag, which they left like a rag on the floor.
Much of the stolen goods looked like junk - what can you do with a truckload of plastic chairs, or ugly chrome office furniture? I couldn't help remembering the way Iraqi forces stripped Kuwait before they fled in 1991. Was this a repeat performance by the thieves of Baghdad? Perhaps some of the finer pickings, in the palatial residences of Jadriya, were being re-looted for the second time in 12 years.
In Jadriya, home to many of Saddam Hussein's relatives and cronies, traffic jams formed outside the houses. A stolen double-decker city bus was stuffed to the ceiling. At the home of Tariq Aziz, an AFP reporter heard a US officer tell the waiting crowd, "just five more minutes". When the Americans completed their search, the rabble rushed in.
The sequence was repeated at the home of Watban Ibrahim al Hassan, Saddam Hussein's half-brother, who was shot in the leg a few years ago by his psychotic nephew Uday. When US special forces departed, Watban's villa, with its four jacuzzi-equipped bathrooms and 20-metre bedroom balcony over the Tigris, was also stormed by the mob.
In two days of promiscuous, wholesale thieving, I haven't once seen looters argue. It seems to work on a first-come, first-served basis. I saw one surprisingly well-dressed lady stand on a lawn in Jadriya, guarding the white satin living room set she had chosen. A man with two refrigerators stood in the driveway. Both waited for friends or relatives to pick them up with their booty.
An antique marquetry table was strapped to the roof of a taxi. Another car carried a whole dining room set. Persian carpets were a favourite item. Some looters considered it sport. A man stood proudly beside a garish floor lamp.
In front of the house of Sa'adoun Sha'kar, a former minister, a man stood wearing Sha'kar's black top hat, cheerfully telling passing journalists, "Hello Mister, good!" But laughing, good-natured looters were the exception. Most looked mean and nasty; thieves and a rabble.