DATELINE BAGHDAD
By Robert Fisk
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War dispatches from the frontline

Robert Fisk, of London's Independent newspaper, is one of the world's top foreign correspondents. His reports from Baghdad, target of thousands of missiles and bombs launched by US and British warplanes and ships, appear each day in the pages of his newspaper http://www.independent.co.uk. ColdType is republishing these reports as pdf downloads, ready for printing as inserts into an 8.5" by 11" binder. The cover and biography (above) may also be downloaded for printing.
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LATEST / 17 APRIL 2003
Not liberation, but a new colonial oppression
It’s going wrong, faster than anyone could have imagined. The army of “liberation” has already turned into the army of occupation. The Shias are threatening to fight the Americans, to create their own war of “liberation”. At night on every one of the Shia Muslim barricades in Sadr City, there are 14 men with automatic rifles. Even the US Marines in Baghdad are talking of the insults being flung at them. “Go away! Get out of my face!” an American soldier screamed at an Iraqi trying to push towards the wire surrounding an infantry unit in the capital yesterday. I watched the man’s face suffuse with rage. “God is Great! God is Great!” the Iraqi retorted.
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NEW / 15 APRIL 2003
Now Syria is in Bush’s gunsights
So now Syria is in America’s gunsights. First it’s Iraq, Israel’s most powerful enemy, possessor of weapons of mass destruction – none of which has been found. Now it’s Syria, Israel’s second most powerful enemy, possessor of weapons of mass destruction, or so President George Bush Junior tells us. No word of that possessor of real weapons of mass destruction, Israel – the number of its nuclear warheads in the Negev are now accurately listed – whose Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, has long been complaining that Damascus is the “centre of world terror”.
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NEW / 15 APRIL 2003
The final chapter in sacking of Baghdad
So yesterday was the burning of books. First came the looters, then the arsonists. It was the final chapter in the sacking of Baghdad. The National Library and Archives – a priceless treasure of Ottoman historical documents, including the old royal archives of Iraq – were turned to ashes in 3,000 degrees of heat. Then the library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowment was set ablaze.
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14 APRIL 2003
US defends 2 ministries from the hordes
Iraq’s scavengers have thieved and destroyed what they have been allowed to loot and burn by the Americans – and a two-hour drive around Baghdad shows clearly what the US intends to protect. After days of arson and pillage, here’s a short but revealing scorecard. US troops have sat back and allowed mobs to wreck and then burn the Ministry of Planning, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Irrigation, the Ministry of Trade, the Ministry of Industry, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Information. They did nothing to prevent looters from destroying priceless treasures of Iraq’s history in the Baghdad Archaeological Museum and in the museum in the northern city of Mosul, or from looting three hospitals.The Americans have, though, put hundreds of troops inside two Iraqi ministries that remain untouched – and untouchable.
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13 APRIL 2003
A civilisation torn to pieces
They lie across the floor in tens of thousands of pieces, the priceless antiquities of Iraq’s history. The looters had gone from shelf to shelf, systematically pulling the statues and pots and amphorae of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Medes, the Persians and the Greeks and hurling them down on to the concrete. Our feet crunched on the wreckage of 5,000-year-old marble plinths and stone statuary and pots that had endured every siege of Baghdad, every invasion of Iraq throughout history – only to be destroyed when America came to “liberate” the city.
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12 APRIL 2003
I surveyed the dark chamber of terror
The seat is covered in blue velvet and is soft, comfortable in an upright, sensible sort of way, with big gold armrests upon which his hands – for Saddam Hussein was obsessed with his hands – could rest, and with no door behind it through which assassins could enter. There is no footstool, but the sofas and seats around the vast internal conference chamber of President Saddam’s Jumhuriyah Palace placed every official on a slightly lower level than the Caliph himself. Did I sit on President Saddam’s throne? Of course I did.
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12 APRIL 2003
Who is to blame for this collapse in morality?
Baghdad is burning. You could count 16 columns of smoke rising over the city yesterday afternoon. At the beginning, there was the Ministry of Trade. I watched the looters throw petrol through the smashed windows of the ground floor and the fire burst from them within two seconds.
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12 APRIL 2003
Flames engulf the symbols of power
Let’s talk war crimes. Yes, I know about the war crimes of Saddam. He slaughtered the innocent, gassed the Kurds, tortured his people and – though it is true we remained good friends with this butcher for more than half of his horrible career – could be held responsible for killing up to a million people, the death toll of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. But while we are congratulating ourselves on the “liberation” of Baghdad, an event that is fast turning into a nightmare for many of its residents, it is as good a time as any to recall how we’ve been conducting this ideological war.
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11 APRIL 2003
Arson, anarchy, looting and revenge
It was the day of the looter. They trashed the German embassy and hurled the ambassador’s desk into the yard. I rescued the European Union flag – flung into a puddle of water outside the visa section – as a mob of middle-aged men, women in chadors and screaming children rifled through the consul’s office and hurled Mozart records and German history books from an upper window. The Slovakian embassy was broken into a few hours later. At the headquarters of Unicef, which has been trying to save and improve the lives of millions of Iraqi children since the 1980s, an army of thieves stormed the building, throwing brand new photocopiers on top of each other and sending cascades of UN files on child diseases, pregnancy death rates and nutrition across the floors.
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11 APRIL 2003
“I had to save my men
Something terrible happened on Highway 8. Some say a hundred civilians died there. Others believe that only 40 or 50 men, women and children were cut to pieces by American tank fire when members of the 3rd Infantry Division’s Task Force 315 were ambushed by the Republican Guard.
Many of their corpses still lie rotting in their incinerated cars, a young woman, burnt naked, slumped face down over the rear seat on the Hillah flyover bridge next to half of a male corpse that is hanging out of the driver’s door.
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10 APRIL 2003
Once-oppressed people now walk like giants
The Americans “liberated” Baghdad yesterday, destroyed the centre of Saddam Hussein’s quarter-century of brutal dictatorial power but brought behind them an army of looters who unleashed upon the ancient city a reign of pillage and anarchy. It was a day that began with shellfire and air strikes and blood-bloated hospitals and ended with the ritual destruction of the dictator’s statues. The mobs shrieked their delight. Men who, for 25 years, had grovellingly obeyed Saddam’s most humble secret policeman turned into giants, bellowing their hatred of the Iraqi leader as his vast and monstrous statues thundered to the ground.
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10 APRIL 2003
War is about the failure of the human spirit
It was a scene from the Crimean War; a hospital of screaming wounded and floors running with blood. I stepped in the stuff; it stuck to my shoes, to the clothes of all the doctors in the packed emergency room, it swamped the passageways and the blankets and sheets. The Iraqi civilians and soldiers brought to the Adnan Khairallah Martyr Hospital in the last hours of Saddam Hussein’s regime yesterday – sometimes still clinging to severed limbs – are the dark side of victory and defeat; final proof, like the dead who are buried within hours, that war is about the total failure of the human spirit. As I wandered amid the beds and the groaning men and women lying on them – Dante’s visit to the circles of hell should have included these visions – the same old questions recurred. Was this for 11 September? For human rights? For weapons of mass destruction?
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9 APRIL 2003
Is the US army trying to take out journalists?
First the Americans killed the correspondent of al-Jazeera yesterday and wounded his cameraman. Then, within four hours, they attacked the Reuters television bureau in Baghdad, killing one of its cameramen and a cameraman for Spain’s Tele 5 channel and wounding four other members of the Reuters staff. Was it possible to believe this was an accident? Or was it possible that the right word for these killings – the first with a jet aircraft, the second with an M1A1 Abrams tank – was murder?
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9 APRIL 2003
The dogs were yelping
Day 20 of America’s war for the “liberation” of Iraq was another day of fire, pain and death. It started with an attack by two A-10 jets that danced in the air like acrobats, tipping on one wing, sliding down the sky to turn on another, and spraying burning phosphorus to mislead heat-seeking missiles before turning their cannons on a government ministry and plastering it with depleted uranium shells. The day ended in blood-streaked hospital corridors and with three foreign correspondents dead and five wounded.
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8 APRIL 2003
It seemed that Baghdad would fall in hours
It started with a series of massive vibrations, a great “stomping” sound that shook my room. “Stomp, stomp, stomp,” it went. I lay in bed trying to fathom the cause. It was like the moment in Jurassic Park when the tourists first hear footfalls of the dinosaur, an ever increasing, ever more frightening thunder of a regular, monstrous heartbeat. From my window on the east bank of the Tigris, I saw an Iraqi anti-aircraft gun firing from the roof of a building half a mile away, shooting across the river at something. “Stomp, stomp,” it went again, the sound so enormous it set off alarms in cars along the bank.
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NEW / 7 APRIL 2003
The twisted language of war
Why do we aid and abet the lies and propaganda of this filthy war? How come, for example, it’s now BBC “style” to describe the Anglo-American invaders as the “coalition”. This is a lie. The “coalition” that we’re obviously supposed to remember is the one forged to drive Iraqi occupation troops from Kuwait in 1991, an alliance involving dozens of countries – almost all of whom now condemn President Bush Junior’s adventure in Iraq. There are a few Australian special forces swanning about in the desert, courtesy of the country’s eccentric Prime Minister, John Howard, but that’s it.
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6 APRIL 2003
The battle of Baghdad
The Iraqi bodies were piled high in the pick-up truck in front of me, army boots hanging over the tailboard, a soldier with a rifle sitting beside them. Beside the highway, a squad of troops was stacking grenades as the ground beneath us vibrated with the impact of US air strikes. The area was called Qadisiya. It was Iraq’s last front line. Thus did the Battle for Baghdad enter its first hours, a conflict that promises to be both dirty and cruel.
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5 APRIL 2003
Where were the panicking crowds?
A kind of fraudulent, nonchalant mood clogged Baghdad yesterday. There appeared to be no attempt to block the main highway into the city. Save for a few soldiers on the streets and a squad car of police, you might have thought this a holiday. All day yesterday, I asked myself the same question: where was the supposed American assault on Baghdad? Where were the panicking crowds? Where were the food queues? Where were the empty streets?
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4 APRIL 2003
The ministry of mendacity strikes again
Poor old Geoff Hoon. It must be tough having to defend the indefensible when the Americans insist on plastering their missiles with computer codes that reveal their provenance even after they have blown the innocent to pieces. Take the poor old man – far poorer in every way than Mr Hoon – who produced that telling scrap of fuselage at Shu’ala last week, proving that the missile which hit the dirt-poor Shia Muslim slums was made by Raytheon, manufacturers of the cruise missile.
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NEW / 3 APRIL 2003
Saddam’s masters of concealment
The road to the front in central Iraq is a place of fast-moving vehicles, blazing Iraqi anti-aircraft guns, tanks and trucks hidden in palm groves, a train of armoured vehicles bombed from the air and hundreds of artillery positions dug into revetments to defend the capital. That a Western journalist could see so much of Iraq’s military preparedness says as much for the Iraqi government’s self-confidence as it does for the need of Saddam Hussein’s regime to make propaganda against its enemies.
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NEW / 3 APRIL 2003
Wailing children, the wounded, the dead
The wounds are vicious and deep, a rash of scarlet spots on the back and thighs or face, the shards of shrapnel from the cluster bombs buried an inch or more in the flesh. The wards of the Hillah teaching hospital are proof that something illegal – something quite outside the Geneva Conventions – occurred in the villages around the city once known as Babylon.
The wailing children, the young women with breast and leg wounds, the 10 patients upon whom doctors had to perform brain surgery to remove metal from their heads, talk of the days and nights when the explosives fell “like grapes” from the sky. Cluster bombs, the doctors say – and the detritus of the air raids around the hamlets of Nadr and Djifil and Akramin and Mahawil and Mohandesin and Hail Askeri shows that they are right.
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2 APRIL 2003
Saddam’s spin doctors keep up a war front
It was a most peculiar day. Overnight, the Americans had pulverised a neo-Classical office block next to what was – before a previous pulverisation – the Iraqi government’s Department of Air Armaments. Then, just before 10am yesterday, an aircraft could be heard diving high over Baghdad and a clap of sound from the other side of the Tigris, with the usual grey-black column of smoke, signalled the end of another annexe belonging to the sons of Saddam. Then came the bus trip.
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1 APRIL 2003
Monster of Baghdad is now hero of Arabia
So it’s a “truly remarkable achievement’’, is it? General Tommy Franks says so. Everything is going “according to plan’’, according to the British. So it’s an achievement that the British still have not “liberated” Basra. It is “according to plan” that the Iraqis should be able to launch a scud missile from the Faw peninsula – supposedly under “British control” for more than a week. It is an achievement, truly remarkable of course, that the Americans lose an Apache helicopter to the gun of an Iraqi peasant, spend four days trying to cross the river bridges at Nasiriyah and are then confronted by their first suicide bomber at Najaf.
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1 APRIL 2003
In the graveyards of Britons killed in another war
At dusk yesterday the ground around the Baghdad North Gate War Cemetery shook with the vibration of the bombs. The oil-grey sky was peppered with anti-aircraft fire. And below the clouds of smoke and the tiny star-like explosion of the shells, Sergeant Frederick William Price of the Royal Garrison Artillery, Corporal A.D. Adsetts of the York and Lancaster Regiment and Aircraftman First Class P. Magee of the Royal Air Force slept on. An eerie place to visit, perhaps, as the first of the night raids closed in on the capital of Iraq.
Not so.
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31 MARCH 2003
Suicide strikes fear into Allied hearts
Sergeant Ali Jaffar Moussa Hamadi al-Nomani was the first Iraqi combatant known to stage a suicide attack. Not even during the uprising against British rule did an Iraqi kill himself to destroy his enemies.Nomani was also a Shia Muslim – a member of the same sect the Americans faithfully believed to be their secret ally in their invasion of Iraq. Even the Iraqi government initially wondered how to deal with his extraordinary action, caught between its desire to dissociate themselves from an event that might remind the world of Osama bin Laden and its determination to threaten the Americans with more such attacks.
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31 MARCH 2003
A quiet night in Baghdad
n the roof of the al-Jazeera office in Baghdad, you could hear the missile coming. It swooped down out of the clouds of smoke south of the Tigris, hissed past the office and disappeared over the old Ahrar bridge. “Was that what I think it was?” the anchorman asked me down the line from Doha. Ah yes, indeed. It was one of those days. A few minutes later, chatting to the al-Jazeera staff in their waterfront villa, an old colonial home with wooden bannisters and beautifully crafted blue-and-white patterned floor tiles, came the sound of supersonic jets.
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30 MARCH 2003
Blood and bandages for the innocent
The piece of metal is only a foot high, but the numbers on it hold the clue to the latest atrocity in Baghdad. At least 62 civilians had died by yesterday afternoon, and the coding on that hunk of metal contains the identity of the culprit. The Americans and British were doing their best yesterday to suggest that an Iraqi anti-aircraft missile destroyed those dozens of lives, adding that they were “still investigating” the carnage. But the coding is in Western style, not in Arabic. And many of the survivors heard the plane.
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29 MARCH 2003
Raw realities expose the truth about Basra
It’s difficult to weep about a telephone exchange. True, the destruction of the local phone system in Baghdad is a miserable experience for tens of thousands of Iraqi families who want to keep in contact with their relatives during the long dark hours of bombing. But the shattered exchanges and umbilical wires and broken concrete of the Mimoun International Communications Centre scarcely equals the exposed bones and intestines and torn flesh of the civilian wounded of Baghdad.
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28 MARCH 2003
Just another little degradation
Two British soldiers lie dead on a Basra roadway, a small Iraqi girl – victim of an Anglo American air strike – is brought to hospital with her intestines spilling out of her stomach, a terribly wounded woman screams in agony as doctors try to take off her black dress. An Iraqi general, surrounded by hundreds of his armed troops, stands in central Basra and announces that Iraq’s second city remains firmly in Iraqi hands. The unedited al-Jazeera videotape – filmed over the past 36 hours and newly arrived in Baghdad – is raw, painful, devastating.
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27 MARCH 2003
Killed by missiles from an American jet
It was an outrage, an obscenity. The severed hand on the metal door, the swamp of blood and mud across the road, the human brains inside a garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an Iraqi mother and her three small children in their still-smouldering car. Two missiles from an American jet killed them all – by my estimate, more than 20 Iraqi civilians, torn to pieces before they could be ‘liberated’ by the nation that destroyed their lives. Who dares, I ask myself, to call this ‘collateral damage’? Abu Taleb Street was packed with pedestrians and motorists when the American pilot approached through the dense sandstorm that covered northern Baghdad in a cloak of red and yellow dust and rain yesterday morning.
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26 MARCH 2003
Baghdad shakes to the rumble of B-52s
All night, you could hear the carpet-bombing by the B-52s. It was a long, low rumble, sometimes for minutes. The targets, presumably the Republican Guards, must have been 30 miles away but, each time that ominous, dark sound began, the air pressure changed in the room where I’m staying near the Tigris river. I’ve put some flowers in a vase near the window and the water in it was gently shaking all night as the vibrations came out of the ground and air. God spare anyone under that, I thought.
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25 MARCH 2003
The shocking truth about ‘shock and awe’
So far, the Anglo-American armies are handing their propaganda to the Iraqis on a plate. First, on Saturday, we were told – courtesy of the BBC – that Umm Qasr, the tiny Iraqi seaport on the Gulf, had “fallen”. Why cities have to “fall” on the BBC is a mystery to me; the phrase comes from the Middle Ages when city walls literally collapsed under siege. Then we were told – again on the BBC – that Nasiriyah had been captured. Then its “embedded” correspondent informed us – and here my old journalistic suspicions were alerted – that it had been “secured”.
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25 MARCH 2003
Saddam starts to sound like his hero, Uncle Joe
Let us now praise famous men. Saddam Hussein was keen on doing just that yesterday. And he proceeded to list the Iraqi army and navy officers who are leading the resistance against the Anglo-American army in Umm Qasr, Basra and Nasariyah. Major-General Mustapha Mahmoud Umran, commanding officer of the 11th Division, Brigadier Bashir Ahmed Othman, commander of the Iraqi 45th Brigade, Brigadier-Colonel Ali Kalil Ibrahim, commander of the 11th Battalion of the 45th Brigade, Colonel Mohamed Khallaf al-Jabawi, commander of the 45th Brigade’s 2nd Battalion, Lieutenant-Colonel Fathi Rani Majid of the Iraqi army’s III Corps ... And so it went on.
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24 MARCH 2003
‘Iraq will be a quagmire for the Americans’
Iraq stunned the Americans and British last night by broadcasting video tape of captured and dead American troops – the nightmare of both George Bush and Tony Blair. The body of one American soldier was seen with a great red gash on his neck, while five US prisoners appeared on screen. One, a black female soldier, had been wounded, while a male serviceman said he had been “only following orders”.
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23 MARCH 2003
The reality of war. We bomb. They suffer
Donald Rumsfeld says the American attack on Baghdad is “as targeted an air campaign as has ever existed” but he should not try telling that to five-year-old Doha Suheil. She looked at me yesterday morning, drip feed attached to her nose, a deep frown over her small face as she tried vainly to move the left side of her body. The cruise missile that exploded close to her home in the Radwaniyeh suburb of Baghdad blasted shrapnel into her tiny legs – they were bound up with gauze – and, far more seriously, into her spine. Now she has lost all movement in her left leg.
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22 MARCH 2003
The missiles came with devastating shrieks
Saddam’s main presidential palace, a great rampart of a building 20 storeys high, simply exploded in front of me – a cauldron of fire, a 100ft sheet of flame and a sound that had my ears singing for an hour after. The entire, massively buttressed edifice shuddered under the impact. Then four more cruise missiles came in. It is the heaviest bombing Baghdad has suffered in more than 20 years of war. All across the city last night, massive explosions shook the ground.
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21 MARCH 2003
Bubbles of fire tear into the sky
It was like a door slamming deep beneath the surface of the earth; a pulsating, minute-long roar of sound that brought President George Bush’s supposed crusade against “terrorism” to Baghdad last night. There was a thrashing of tracer on the horizon from the Baghdad air defences – the Second World War-era firepower of old Soviet anti-aircraft guns – and then a series of tremendous vibrations that had the ground shaking under our feet. Bubbles of fire tore into the sky around the Iraqi capital, dark red at the base, golden at the top.
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21 MARCH 2003
Rumbling explosions and calls to prayer
Initially, the city of Baghdad was stunned by the onset of war. For more than an hour, I watched the tracers racing across the pre-dawn sky above the city and the yellow flash of anti-aircraft batteries positioned on a ministry roof. The sound was impressive – the Iraqis have always been good at London Blitz-style sound effects – but by first light the few rumbling explosions were already mixed with the call to the Fajr prayer from the minarets of Baghdad. How many times under siege over the past 1,000 years, I wondered, must that call have echoed across this city?
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20 MARCH 2003
Shopping for canned food and painkillers
In Yasser Arafat Street, at the Sana Nimr al-Ibrahim pharmacy, Riad offered to give me two rolls of bandages free. I told him I’d better pay, since I thought the RAF was going to bomb him in a few hours time. “I think they are,’’ he said. Then he shot me the kind of grin I didn’t deserve. As a Brit, buying emergency rations in the shops of Baghdad yesterday evening was an instructive experience. Riad’s pharmacy was crowded, his customers buying up not just bandages but splints, painkillers, tweezers, cotton wool, disinfectant and rubbing alcohol. It had been the same on Tuesday night, from 5pm right up to 10pm.
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19 MARCH 2003
Hope fades for citizens of Baghdad
The darkness is beginning to descend, the fog of anxiety that falls upon all people when they realise that they face unimaginable danger. It’s not just the thousands of empty, shut-up shops in Baghdad, whose owners are taking their goods home for fear of looting. It’s not even the sight of concrete barges beside the Tigris to provide transport if the Americans blow up the great bridges. It’s a feeling – and I quote a long-term Baghdad resident who has lived in the Middle East for almost a quarter of a century – that “the glue will come unstuck and there will be nothing left to hold people together”.
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18 MARCH 2003
Inside a city sleepwalking to war
For Baghdad, it is night number 1,001, the very last few hours of fantasy. As UN inspectors prepared to leave the city in the early hours of this morning, Saddam Hussein has appointed his own son, Qusay, to lead the defence of the city of the Caliphs against the American invasion. Yet at the Armed Forces club yesterday, I found the defenders playing football. Iraqi television prepares Baghdad people for the bombardment to come with music from the Hollywood film, Gladiator. But the Iraqis went on with their work of disarming the soon-to-be invaded nation, observing the destruction of two more Al-Samoud missiles.
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