ODD ANDERSON/AFP

Inside Basra
	For two weeks, the people of the city were caught in a standoff between British troops and Ba'athist fanatics. Then came liberation — and anarchy. Basra's tale
	By TERRY McCARTHY | Basra

Posted Sunday, Apr. 21, 2003; 16.47BST
Saadi al Shuwaili was shaken from his bed by the rumbling of U.S. bombers over his neighborhood, the Tuwasah district of Basra. About an hour later — 5:30 a.m. on April 5 — he heard six deafening blasts, two of which came from a house 500 m from his own. British intelligence had a solid tip that Ali Hassan al-Majid — known as Chemical Ali for his role in gassing the Kurds in 1988, and now the general commanding the Iraqi military in the south — was meeting at the house with Ba'ath party officials. The bombs incinerated the building, and with it went Iraqi resistance in Basra. News traveled fast that Chemical Ali was gone. "The next morning, everything was over," says Saadi, a 53-year-old math teacher at Tahrir Intermediate Boys' school. "The fedayeen [militia] all disappeared by 10 in the morning." Then the British marched into Basra to face not gunfire but cheering crowds.

This was exactly the scene that British and American war planners hoped to see: jubilant Iraqis welcoming coalition troops into a liberated city. For two weeks, the residents of Basra had shown enormous fortitude and resilience as their city was pounded by British artillery and American bombs. Caught in a standoff between the British forces surrounding the city and the Ba'athist loyalists who still controlled it, they suffered food and water shortages and power failures; families faced the threat of execution by the fedayeen if their men refused to fight. Somehow they managed to get on with their lives — and finally Basra fell. But there was more to survive. The joy of liberation was soon followed by anarchy as mobs rampaged through the city in an orgy of looting. Thieves roamed the streets of the business district armed with crowbars and some firearms, and after dark there were running firefights between rival gangs. One afternoon a small group of looters was busy removing weapons and ammunition from a red shipping container abandoned by fleeing Iraqi soldiers. They were watched by two British snipers positioned on the roof of the Basra Teaching Hospital, about 350 m away. With Basra on the brink of anarchy, the last thing the city needed was more weapons on the streets. But the snipers were not authorized to shoot unless the looters stormed the hospital or threatened doctors or British forces.

"It's bloody frustrating," said Lance Corporal Nick Young, an eight-year veteran of the British Royal Marines. "We can't do a thing. They won't even let us put warning shots down." Young was eventually allowed to fire warnings that dispersed the gang, but only after they had already grabbed most of the weapons cache. Security around the city had deteriorated so badly that by the weekend British troops were mounting patrols with local police officers to keep the peace. The battle to restore law and order had begun.

Some people expected the worst from the start. Even before the invasion began, Abu Fawez, the owner of the 49-room Al Rashed Hotel off Al Wattana Street in the city center, was bricking up doors and windows — not against war damage, but against the looting that was sure to follow the fighting. "We knew what was coming," he says. As the first bombs fell on Baghdad, coalition planes dropped leaflets over Basra explaining that the British were coming as liberators and promising to bring food and water. A few days later, British Challenger tanks and artillery were engaging Iraqi military positions on the outskirts of the city.

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