Archive for the ‘Baghdad’ Category
Attacks mark Baghdad anniversary
Posted on: April 9, 2008
- In: American | anniversary | Attacks | Baghdad | children | Iraq' | Petraeus
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At least six people have been killed in mortar attacks in Baghdad on the fifth anniversary of the city’s capture by American forces. The attacks, in the Sadr City district of the city, came as the capital observed a vehicle curfew. Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr had called for a mass anti-American rally, but cancelled it amid security concerns. It is five years since US troops pulled down a large statue of the late Saddam Hussein in the city centre. Witnesses and officials told the BBC that one mortar exploded at a funeral wake, killing one person and wounding unknown others. A second mortar landed on a building, killing five. Baghdad’s Green Zone, which houses diplomatic missions and much of Iraq’s government, also came under mortar fire but there are no reports of injuries. Cars and motorcycles have been banned from the streets until midnight (2100 GMT), the Iraqi government said. People have been mostly staying at home, reports say. Clashes overnight in Sadr City between Iraqi and US forces and militiamen loyal to the cleric left at least 12 people dead, medical workers said. Fragile truce Moqtada Sadr had said that a one-million-strong protest was planned to mark the anniversary, but he called it off, saying he feared there could be bloodshed.
He also threatened to suspend a truce – credited with helping curb violence levels in Iraq since last year – by his powerful Mehdi Army militia. “If necessary the ceasefire will be lifted in order to implement our aims, ideology, religion, principles, nationhood,” a statement said. On Monday, Iraq’s prime minister threatened to exclude the radical Shia cleric’s movement from politics unless he disbanded the Mehdi Army. In recent weeks, Moqtada Sadr’s followers have clashed with Iraqi government troops and US forces in southern Iraq and Baghdad, as the government tried to crack down on militias. On Tuesday, the top US military leader in Iraq, Gen David Petraeus, told US Congress that any progress recently made in Iraq were “fragile and is reversible”. He recommended a suspension of US troop withdrawals after July to protect security gains made during the Iraq “surge”, which saw an increase in US forces. After the planned “drawdown” of about 20,000 troops, there should be a 45-day “period of consolidation and evaluation”, Gen Petraeus said. |
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- In: Baghdad | Five Years In | Iraqi Government | Politics | Saddam Hussein | Safety | Violence
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Iraqis trampled on a statue of Saddam Hussein, seconds after U.S. forces in Baghdad pulled it down. (Photo: James Hill/The New York Times)
At the outset, for me, the approach of American troops to Baghdad was an issue of intense personal concern, as much as professional. The Army and Marine units that arrived at the outskirts of Baghdad in the first days of April 2003 were viewed, then, by an overwhelming majority of Iraqis as liberators from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. But they were my liberators, too.
Ten days earlier, Saddam’s thugs had come for me in the middle of the night in my room at the Palestine Hotel beside the Tigris River in the heart of the Iraqi capital, during a lull in the American bombing. I had been expecting them; in the last weeks before the invasion, the menacing character who acted as ringmaster for the foreign press in Baghdad in his capacity as the regime’s information director, Uday al-Tai’ee, had taken to mocking me as “the most dangerous man in Iraq” for stories I had writtenabout Saddam’s merciless terror on his own people, and I had understood the code.
“Brave fellow, aren’t you?” al-Tai’ee seemed to be saying. “But just wait. You can insult Saddam with impunity now, because you know we won’t kill a reporter for The New York Times as long as there’s a chance of avoiding this war. So you’re shooting from behind a blind, and that doesn’t take so much courage. But once the war starts, and we’re free to do what we please, that’ll be a different matter. Then we’ll see how tough you really are.”
The practitioners of Saddam’s miseries were brutal, but they were also cowardly and venal, and the plug-uglies who stormed into my hotel room were true to form. I told the lead thug, a man assigned to me by al-Tai’ee a few days before the war as my “minder,” and whom I knew to be from the Mukhabarat, Saddam’s secret police, that his name was known to my editors in New York (true) and that if anything happened to me, they’d pass his name to the Pentagon and he’d end up in front of an American firing squad (pure fiction). With frontline American units advancing rapidly on Baghdad, I thought it might catch his attention. “You’re threatening me,” he said.
“Yes, I am,” I said, “just as you’re threatening me.”
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