Adrian Blomfield went to
Baghdad as a strong believer in regime change. Now he thinks
that Bush has messed up in Iraq — and should be booted out of
the White House
When I arrived in Baghdad, I was initially encouraged. The place
seemed normal. The streets were busy, clogged with traffic and the
shops and restaurants were open. People seemed to be getting on with
life. Sure, there were signs of war and occupation here and there:
patrols of US Humvees; Bradley Fighting Vehicles; Abrams tanks;
concrete barricades topped with razor wire and warnings scrawled on
the barriers — ‘Do not stop here, or you will be shot.’ But there
was less bomb damage than I had expected and fewer explosions. My
only problem, to start with, was that I could not seem to find an
Iraqi with a good word to say about the Americans.
On my second Friday in the city I visited Mutanabbi Street in the
heart of Baghdad’s intellectual quarter. Surely here they would be
grateful for having been liberated. The weekly book market was in
full swing and the reading matter that lined both sides of the
winding alleyway would have made Saddam blanch: Shia religious
texts, communist tomes, plays that satirised the former dictator and
his sons, even the odd slightly racy novel. Most of the booksellers
seemed to have been imprisoned or tortured by Saddam’s ghastly
secret service, the Mukhabarat.
I fell in with Sami al-Mutairy, a one-eyed Trotskyite poet (the
other had been gouged out by the Mukhabarat). We went for a cup of
coffee at the famous Shahbandar café at the top of the street. As we
listened to excited debates on political theories, I turned to Sami
and said: ‘You and your friends must have been pretty delighted with
the US invasion.’ He stared at me as though I were mad. ‘But look at
this place,’ I insisted. ‘You’re free to talk about what you want
and nobody is going to lock you up. Surely things are better than
they were.’
‘Of course we are glad Saddam has gone,’ Sami replied gravely.
‘But things are worse in many ways now. Then, if you stuck your neck
out you got clobbered. Now it’s indiscriminate and everyone is
affected.’
Sami was right. As the weeks progressed, the attacks escalated.
The number of explosions I could hear from my hotel jumped from
about two a day to about 15. Suicide bombings claimed more and more
lives. Najaf and the southern Shia cities again rose up at the
bidding of Muqtada al-Sadr, the spoilt, portly young cleric who drew
to his cause the hopeless and the dispossessed.
But Iraqis were not just being killed by insurgents or foreign
fighters. In a hospital in Sadr City, the sprawling Shia slum in
northern Baghdad that is home to perhaps half the city’s population,
I watched as, in the space of an hour, six young children were
brought in. They were smeared in blood, screaming in agony and
terror, faeces dribbling from their bowels. They were victims of the
1st US Cavalry Division, sent to quell the fighting raging around
us. Outside the hospital an old man, surrounded by four small
coffins, wailed at the loss of all his children struck by a shell
fired from an American tank.
During the course of one week, the Telegraph’s chief driver and
office manager, brother and sister, lost six relatives — two in a
suicide bombing in Baqubah, four mowed down by a US tank as they
drove back to Baghdad.
In an opinion poll conducted by the International Republican
Institute at the end of September, Iraqis were asked the following
question: in the past year and a half, has your household been
directly affected by violence in terms of death, handicap or
significant monetary loss? Over one in five, 22 per cent, replied
yes. A Western security company working for the Coalition estimates
that there are about 80 insurgent attacks a day in Iraq. Barely a
week goes by when one of Iraq’s 18 provinces escapes an attack.
It is true that the Americans have refurbished 3,500 schools and
built 70 healthcare centres, but such positive developments are
overwhelmed by the violence and lawlessness that grip Iraq every
day. We hear a lot about the abduction of foreign nationals. More
than 150 have been taken and more than 30 executed. But what of the
thousands of Iraqis who have also been kidnapped for ransom? Schools
may have been built, but many Iraqi mothers are too afraid to send
their children to them lest they too are seized.
