nolympics submits

We spent the better part of this afternoon in the middle of a firefight. We left our hotel at around 1 pm, headed for the Jordanian embassy, which was hit by a car bomb early this morning.  As we drove out, we saw a tall column of thick black smoke rising straight up into the windless sky just a mile or two away.  We told our driver to turn around and we sped to the scene.  We were the first journalists there.

We found the smoke coming from the flattened skeleton of a US humvee, burning pathetically in the street.  There were two other vehicles in the convoy, another humvee and a 2-1/2 ton truck.  The soldiers in those vehicles were taking cover behind their rides and waiting for reinforcements. We hustled up just behind them and took cover on the sidewalk.  An al-Jazeera cameraman and a couple of others came in behind us.

The assault took place on al-Karada street, which has a lot of shops selling electronic equipment such as refrigerators and air conditioners. We later learned that US troops, to their misfortune, are fond of stopping their patrols there and going shopping for porn DVDs sold by street vendors.

As we laid on the sidewalk, all the ammo in the burning humvee exploded. It sounded like a very intense 30-second gunfight.  When it stopped, we ran across the street and took refuge in an air-conditioner shop.  The proprietors offered us water and some cement columns to stand behind.

All the while the US soldiers, perhaps 6 of them, were standing by their vehicles.  A good sniper could have hit any of them, and their vehicles would have been easy targets for anyone with an RPG, which are abundant in this city.  For awhile, however, there was no shooting.

After a while, the reinforcements showed up.  Bradley fighting vehicles from the 1st armored division and infantry from, I believe, the 101st airborne.  The US decided that the perpetrators of the attack were holed up in a 3-story building housing, apparently, a number of electronics shops and offices.  We were about 150 meters back from the building, and the formerly barren street was quickly filled with soldiers ahead and behind us.  A local guy told us 150 people worked in the building.

The Bradleys unleashed their 25 mm cannons on the building.
Simultaneously, there was a lot of M16 and possibly .50 cal. fire targeted on the building.  The Bradleys were firing, we confirmed later, high explosive rounds, not the depleted uranium they are notorious for.  These guns, cannons essentially, are really fucking loud.  If they’re aimed at you, the sound alone must be terrifying.  As they hit the building, flashes of light and clouds of dust rose out of the walls.  I thought the building was going to go down, but it didn't.  After a number of these volleys, the stone building caught fire and increasingly large flames shot up the sides.

As these assaults took place, foot soldiers advanced on the building.  I could not see what they were doing, but I assume they used the cannons as cover fire to enter and sweep the building.  There was some, but not a lot, of return fire, and we could hear what were probably Kalashnikov bullets whizzing down the street in front of us.  I tried to stand behind good cover while still taking as many pictures as possible.  Our cameraman, Garrett, and our translator/guide, a 25-year-old kid who was once drafted into Saddam’s Fedayeen against his will, took great risk to advance upon the scene and film.

A good while after these assaults, and well after the building caught fire, several groups of civilians, looking absolutely terrified, ran from the building with their hands up.  I would estimate there were at least 30 of them, and I have no idea how many didn’t make it out.

At a certain point, the Americans seemed to decide that the situation was over and it all just petered out.  I don’t know about casualties.  We saw one American soldier evacuated, and we heard his leg had been shot.  The US delayed his evacuation so that they could line up Bradleys in front of the photojournalists to prevent pictures from being taken of him.  I hear the Americans don’t even want to talk about the situation, and won’t admit
to any casualties.

A young Iraqi guy who worked in the building was standing next to me on the sidewalk, and he broke down crying.  I put my arm around him while he composed himself, and then he went off to try to fight the fire.

The driver of one of the Bradleys asked me to grab him a soft drink out of an abandoned sidewalk stand.  It didn’t seem like a good time to argue that stealing sodas was bad for winning hearts and minds, so I took out a drink, vainly looked for someone to pay, and gave it to the soldier.  I asked him whether the Americans had been firing depleted uranium, but he didn’t know what that was (even though it is the primary weapon of the
vehicle he was driving).  He told me to ask the gunner, who said they had been firing high explosive rounds, which comported with my observations, and the situation (DU would probably not be used to blow up a building).

As we left the scene, an old shopowner told us that he knew this was going happen at some point.  The Americans it seemed, were always stopping here to buy porn DVDs, which they take back to their bases to watch on laptops. Even though Muslims don’t like this, poverty is so bad that there is always someone willing to make the sale.  These discs are sold in the open in front of women and children, and it makes the locals very angry. Whatever the propriety of porn, or Muslim conceptions of women and sex, I can’t believe the Americans would be stupid enough to do this.  Or maybe I can believe it.

We left, and returned to the scene a couple hours later.  The Americans were gone (probably a good idea for their own self-preservation), and they had taken the humvee skeleton with them.  A big crowd was milling about, uniformly happy about the US casualties and angry about the attack on their neighborhood.  I don’t understand Arabic, but I heard a lot of people, especially kids, enthusiastically saying, “Saddam.”

Lots of young people were dancing on the ashen hole in the ground where the humvee had been, and many young kids wanted me to take their picture holding pieces of US debris.  The word on the street was that someone had planted a remote-controlled bomb in the dirt in the median strip of the
road, in a place the Americans routinely stopped.  One man said the humvee’s gunner, standing out of the vehicle’s roof, had been cut in half, and the driver, standing nearby, had been vaporized.  We also heard, variously, that two to four Iraqi civilians had been killed.  I’ve never been to a place as rife with improbable rumors as Baghdad, so I have no idea whether any of this was true.  I doubt however, that anyone would have detonated a bomb underneath an unoccupied humvee.

Up to now, the Iraqis I have met on the street have been uniformly friendly and inviting.  Here, it was different.  People were angry, and we didn’t belong here.  Many people smiled and greeted us with “salaam” (peace), but others had angry looks on their faces and I wanted to get out of there.  After one of my traveling companions finished talking to the people who lived next door to the building the US attacked (they said they
hid in the basement and were angry that their house had been damaged), we took off. I will say that my guess is that if there had been large civilian casualties today, people would have been much angrier than they were, so perhaps it wasn't as bad as one might fear.

The past couple days had been pretty quiet in Baghdad, and the US, I think, was about to start talking about trends towards order.  Today, with the Jordanian embassy bombing (there are rumors circulating that the Jordanians sent ambulances and surgeons to pick up their consul, who lost a leg or two, but I don’t know if they’re true) and the firefight, things aren’t looking so good.  We started the day by attending a demonstration by the unemployed workers’ union, a front for the Workers’ Communist
Party, trots, but some of the only people doing secular organizing in the city.  The group, about 150 strong, sat down in the street and blocked the entrance to the Republican Palace, the US headquarters.  The US just ignored them until it petered out.  Paul Bremer was supposed to give a press briefing today but it was, coincidentally, cancelled.

Tomorrow we’re “embedding” with the Florida National Guard.  After today, we’re not too interested in riding around in humvees, so we’ll probably just hang out behind the wire and see what the troops have to say. 

We’lltry to be careful.


sf"